Movie Review: "The Vast of Night" is the Definition of Awesome

Here’s an excellent and eerie film that came out of nowhere.

For decades, Hollywood has been keen (too keen, in fact) to coronate The Next Steven Spielberg. It’s a title that’s been held by M. Night Shyamalan, J.J. Abrams and Josh Trank, though never for long, mostly because Shyamalan and Trank flamed out, and Abrams proved to be more mogul than artist.

I hate to now put undue pressure on a new contender, but you watch Andrew Patterson’s innovative, gasp-inducing sci-fi flick The Vast of Night, and try to restrain your enthusiasm. It inspires wonder, and is, by very definition of the word, awesome. Abrams, in Super 8, aped Spielberg’s style to diminishing results. In contrast, The Vast of Night actually made me do the Spielberg Face.

The Vast of Night—shot in 2016, submitted to Slamdance Film Festival in 2019 and released this year on Amazon Prime Video (and at drive-in theatres, because 2020)—is Patterson’s first feature. It comes from writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, who present it as an episode of "Paradox Theatre", a faux-Twilight Zone-esque series about unexplained phenomena. That’s where the pastiche ends, however. The picture proper begins with the camera zooming in on a flickering black-and-white television and plants us in the fictional yet full-colour small town of Cayuga, New Mexico. Roswell may have been too obvious a locale, given what comes next in the 1950s-set pic.

Cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz’s camera stalks the fast-talking radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) as he crosses a high school’s gym floor to evaluate the recording set-up at a local basketball game. The whole town’s in attendance, but duty calls, so he leaves for the radio station while also chaperoning the inquisitive teen switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) to her work. The camera follows close to the ground in unbroken long takes, as they walk empty streets and talk about the unlikely technology of the future (phones with cameras in our hands? pfft). Once alone at her job, a bored Fay listens in as Everett’s show is disrupted by an alien noise. Soon after, the noise comes through her switchboard. She calls Everett for help, and he offers to broadcast the strange signal to see if anyone recognises it. Unfortunately for them, someone does.

The easy shorthand to describe The Vast of Night would be "Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the style of It Follows", even if that might set you up to expect a different thing entirely. Fay and Everett each receive reports of unidentified flying objects in the sky, and citizens being spirited away by unseen entities, but we don't learn until late if they’re being hunted by intergalactic visitors or another unseen threat. Horowitz and McCormick are a fantastically compelling crime-solving duo, and the movie’s very momentum rests on their good-natured characters delivering oodles of dialogue. (They are both effortlessly natural with the period-specific phrasing, and damn funny as well.) The dread, however, comes from feeling something bad is probably coming for them. Please, can it not?

This is an innovative little miracle that sustains its peril and eeriness without traditional action set pieces. Patterson, to shake impatient viewers from their slumber, will instead suddenly make the camera go for a late night sprint to establish the geography of the town, which becomes important when our two heroes race to one another as the situation escalates. Beneath the surface, there’s an underlying commentary on the very idea of invasion, with the largely white town (itself facing a rival basketball team with Native American participants) bracing for a reckoning. A black soldier (voiced by Bruce Davis, delivering a powerful performance entirely over the phone) even calls in and shares the story of his own subjugation at the hands of the American army. These aren’t accidents. A film as sure and deliberate as The Vast of Night doesn’t happen by accident at all.

This is the maximum you’ll want to know about The Vast of Night before watching it, to ensure it keeps some surprises for you, and to guarantee that its stunning, unsettling ending lands with full force. Yet it couldn't be spoiled by a written review if I tried. Its pleasures come from the company of Horowitz and McCormick, the uncanny calm and stillness of the monologue shared by Davis, and the craft of the filmmaking (especially in the score and sound design) that uses its molehill of a budget and makes something momentous. (Not to mention the effectively simple costuming: check out the retro eye-frames these cats are wearing!) The cinemas may be closed right now, but real cinema is still very much happening, if you know where to look.

4.5/5

The Vast of Night is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.