So Fades the Light (2025) Parents Guide

So Fades the Light (2025) – Review

There’s something deeply unsettling about silence not the kind you get when a scene pauses, but the silence that lingers, pressing into your chest like weight. So Fades the Light opens on that silence, and it rarely lets go. This isn’t a movie that shouts its horrors; it whispers them until you’re forced to listen.

In a year packed with noisy thrillers and franchise behemoths, this film dares to do the opposite. It creeps in quietly and leaves you chewing on the aftertaste.

The Story & What It Tries to Say

The story follows Sun, played with haunting restraint by Kiley Lotz a woman who once was considered divine. Not metaphorically. Literally. As a child, Sun was worshipped as a deity in the Iron & Fire Ministry, a fringe religious cult led by the charismatic and terrifying Reverend Gideon, played by D. Duke Solomon. Armed and zealous, the cult believed Sun was the earthly embodiment of God’s light.

Fifteen years before the film begins, the group was dismantled in a violent federal raid one of those Waco-esque infernos that ends in blood and broken headlines. Sun survived. Many did not. Now in her early 30s, Sun drifts through life, rootless and emotionally stunted. She’s not rebuilding; she’s hiding from the world, from the trauma, from her own face in the mirror.

We meet her in the film’s opening moments at a bleak gas station, dirty fingernails, sleep-starved eyes, staring at a blinking road sign that reads “Welcome back to Iron County.” From there, she begins a slow, reluctant journey back to the rural compound where it all happened the church, the fields, the altars, the gun sheds. She claims it’s for closure. We quickly realize it’s not that simple.

The film folds in flashbacks through grainy VHS-style home videos: we see Sun as a young girl, being anointed with oil, surrounded by gun-wielding believers singing in tongues, her face trapped in a performance of holiness she never asked for. It’s not just haunting it’s tragic. You’re watching a child being erased in real time.

But the real tension kicks in when we learn Reverend Gideon has just been released from prison. Unbeknownst to Sun, he’s heading back to the same compound. Whether out of delusion or faith, he believes the ministry can be resurrected. He believes Sun still holds the light.

What follows isn’t a chase or a showdown. It’s something quieter and, in many ways, more disturbing. The film alternates between Sun’s present journey in motels, at old diners, meeting strangers and the Reverend’s deluded efforts to reassemble his flock. Their paths edge closer, but this isn’t about collision. It’s about parallel reckonings.

Through brief but intimate encounters a drifter with a Bible tattoo, a motel clerk who survived her own version of hell, a teenage runaway who doesn’t know who to believe Sun begins to reclaim her voice. These are not “saviors” in the Hollywood sense. They’re broken people sharing space, and for the first time, Sun starts to see herself reflected in their mess, not in Gideon’s mythology.

By the time Sun reaches the church, it’s less a climax and more a reckoning. She finds the Reverend there, preaching to an empty pew, candles lit, his eyes wild with faded glory. What unfolds between them isn’t a cathartic showdown it’s a final, wrenching unraveling. One person clinging to lies. The other begging for silence.

What the film tries to say and what it nails with eerie precision is that surviving trauma isn’t the end of the story. Surviving doesn’t mean healing. It means learning to live in the quiet spaces left behind. So Fades the Light doesn’t offer easy catharsis. It reminds us that sometimes, closure doesn’t look like justice. It looks like walking away.

Highly Recommended:

Performances & Characters

Kiley Lotz is quietly devastating as Sun. There’s a softness to her face that hides a storm, and director Cousineau knows how to sit with her silences. Lotz doesn’t overplay her trauma — she wears it. You see it in the way she averts her eyes, the way she touches old scars on her hands without realizing, the way her voice cracks when she finally says, “I was never divine.”

It’s the kind of performance that doesn’t beg for awards — but deserves them anyway.

D. Duke Solomon’s Reverend Gideon is more complex than he first appears. His charisma simmers beneath the surface, but the years in prison have eroded his edge. He’s desperate, cracked around the corners. The film resists painting him as a cartoon villain. He believes in what he built, and that’s what makes him terrifying.

The supporting cast, though limited in screen time, adds texture. Ny’Ea Reynolds, playing a young waitress who bonds with Sun over their mutual distrust of God, is a standout. William Swift, as an old cult member still clinging to the Reverend’s words, provides a chilling reminder that the past doesn’t stay buried for everyone.

Direction, Visuals & Pacing

Visually, So Fades the Light is stunning in its stillness. The cinematography embraces the rural Midwest’s bleak beauty — empty fields, peeling paint, rusted swingsets, abandoned pews. The flashbacks are shot in degraded, VHS-like textures that blur memory with propaganda, reminding us that childhood trauma isn’t always linear — it’s smeared.

Directors Cousineau and Rosik lean into minimalism. No jump scares. No sweeping score. Just the ambient hum of wind and the distant click of a Zippo. It’s atmospheric, sometimes painfully slow, but never without intention.

If there’s a flaw, it’s pacing. The middle act lingers a bit too long — too many road trip sequences with little narrative movement. There’s a fine line between “meditative” and “meandering,” and the film straddles it uncomfortably at times. Still, the mood is consistent, and when it lands, it lands hard.

So Fades the Light (2025) Parents Guide

Violence: The movie opens with flashbacks to a violent cult raid—guns, screams, destruction but it’s never gore‑porn; it’s raw and unsettling.

Lingering trauma scenes: Sun’s haunted memories might feel more intense than any jump scare.

A tense, emotionally charged confrontation in an abandoned church raises the tension without overt bloodshed.

Language: Dialogue uses mild profanity here and there. We’re talking “hell,” “damn,” maybe the occasional “shit.” Nothing stands out as harsh, but it’s definitely not squeaky clean.

No explicit sex or nudity—this isn’t a romantic or erotic thriller.

Substance Use: There’s a brief glimpse of alcohol—characters in bars or diners sipping drinks. No drug use.

Conclusion

So Fades the Light isn’t for everyone it’s slow-burning, subtle, and emotionally heavy. But if you’re drawn to introspective explorations of trauma, cult influence, and personal reckoning even without big twists it’s a compelling, overdue voice in that landscape. Kiley Lotz’s performance and the visual mood anchor what the script occasionally loses footing in.