brilliant actors, brilliant editing

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Full disc: I love Lindsey Burdge. She has a natural charm and straightforward honesty in all her performances that consistently transcend what's on the page. And even with "The Sideways Light"'s minuscule budget (it looks like one of those films made in borrowed houses owned by crew family members), what's on the page isn't easy to shake or disregard.It was hard to resist comparing this film's real-life horror scenario involving the insidious disease Dementia with Mike Testin's contrived psycho horror show "Dementia" from 2015. "The Sideways Light" (despite the somewhat misleading trailer) doesn't rely on horror movie tropes for it's scares. Instead, it's Burdge coming home to babysit her spiraling grandmother (played with a frightening lucidity by Jeanne Evans) and having no idea what she's getting herself into.Nana follows Lily (Burdge) around incessantly, alternating between jarring savant-like awareness and incoherent gibberish. She refuses to leave the house, thereby trapping her granddaughter with her to the point where Lily begins to fear for her own sanity. And that's basically it. Through it all Lily dives for normalcy by attempting to spark an affair with sexy barkeep Aiden (Matthew Newton) and her increasingly wheedling attempts to get relief from her brother Sam (Mark Reeb) who keeps pushing for the idea of simply putting Nana into a home. But Lily can't do it, for a variety of reasons, and it's almost impossible to not put yourself in her shoes. This is due to mostly to the strength of the performances, yet Jennifer Harlow's direction is primarily the means by which the screws of psychological torture are tightened. It's a well-modulated, realistically paced thriller that's creepy for all too real reasons.

The only reason I am giving this movie a score of four out of ten is because I'm being VERY generous, because I only watched 40 minutes of it. Around 20 minutes into the movie I started doing other things and just had this sucker playing in the background. Finally I went to this website, IMDb and checked the score. Once I saw it ranks around a 5, I stopped watching right there and then. Honestly, this film isn't for most. It is about a daughter moving back in with her mother who is elderly and suffering from dementia. You learn all that within the first 2 minutes of the movie. The problem is the movie does not progress anywhere at all. And I wasn't planning to waste anymore time waiting around for the plot to develop after I saw such a low ranking. The only good things about the film is the performance from the character playing the mother and the soundtrack is above average.