Movie review: ‘Safelight’

In Safelight, director/writer Tony Aloupis sure piles it on our hero, Charles.

Not only does the high-school student (played by Evan Peters, Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past) have a disability in ’70s-era desert California — meaning he’s bullied mercilessly by his classmates — but his older brother has died in Vietnam, his mom has up and left, and his dad (Jason Beghe) is deathly ill from some unnamed disease.

The only thing that keeps him going is his talent for photography. That is until Vicki (Juno Temple, Maleficent) walks into his life. She’s the 18-year-old prostitute who just started working in front of the truck stop where Charles is the cashier.

They meet when, while Vicki is being abused out front by her pimp (Kevin Alejandro, True Blood), Charles attempts to rescue her wielding a baseball bat. From there, if it’s not love for Charles and Vicki, it’s at least friendship or something close to it. She even helps him with the dream photo project that his brother originally wanted to do: shooting the lighthouses of the California coast.

There’s a sweetness to Safelight that helps ease the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliches and Charles’ woe-begotten life, which sometimes feels more like screen life than real life. But when the final shot fades, you just might find yourself wondering what’s going to happen with these two crazy kids.

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This story was originally published July 16, 2015 at 7:58 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Safelight’."