🎭 Drama 💥 Thriller ☣ SciFi (2019) 🇺🇸

"Everett! Can I bring you my tape recorder so you can show me how it works?" "I don't know what you said, Fay. You sound like a mouse being eaten by a possum."

The Vast of Night, while only modestly thrilling, is warm, charming, and nostalgic, with well-written dialogue, memorable characters, and the old-timey feel of a teleplay on radio-age hysteria.

It follows a telephone switchboard operator and a small-town radio broadcaster through a remarkable evening as a strange signal starts to creep into local phone calls and people become convinced there is something military-secret or even extraterrestrial at work.

What I love about The Vast of Night is the scope and the pacing. This has the spirit of a one-take film. It’s not, but many of the best moments of the film are multi-minute shots traversing an entire town and the night space in between it. It’s possible to sprint from the switchboard to the radio station to the school and back, and we know that because the camera does it, following the characters in a mini-scope story that lasts only the length of a single basketball match.

I’ve always enjoyed films that are willing to do their work in real time, or close to it. It’s differently immersive. The human interactions become much larger even with major plot points happening, because you get to see real changes in interactions on the timescale where actual humans interact. Most of us don’t have the privilege of an editor cropping multiple weeks of our lives into cinematic sequences. We grow relationships minute by minute, and connections change between people realistically and quickly at their real pace.

This is really the film of a friendship as it develops over ninety minutes. The Vast of Night starts with minutes of friendly banter between Jake Horowitz’s Everett and basically everyone he encounters. Sierra McCormick’s Fay gets pulled into this endless patter, and it is great fun to spend time with these two acquaintances (but certainly not friends) as they form a playful connection over how to use a tape recorder, what questions to ask the parents at the basketball match, is there a problem with the mice eating wires?—and then when odd sounds start coming from the night, that connection grows quickly into an actual friendship as they both only have each other to figure out what is happening in and above their town.

The vast of night isn’t what’s interesting here, though the overarching narrative related to the signal is clever and clear. What is interesting is where this friendship begins and where, just under two hours later, it stands as the audience steps away from the world of the film.

This dynamic—of the real-time development of an actual friendship—is frequently lost, and all of the time-hopping that most cinema does can lose the reality of human relationships. This doesn’t. Victoria (2015), before any thriller elements come into play, has a very similar effect. The tradeoff of large scope and rapid cuts is we don’t get to see these subtle shifts as clearly. I think this is also why Hill House’s Two Storms is the strongest episode of the series and one of the stronger writing moments in horror.

I enjoyed this story rather a lot. Very little happens, but a lot changes in a few people, and I’m almost certain I’ll rewatch The Vast of Night to see that very little happen all over again. What a warm-hearted and genuine film.

Strong recommendation.

Some Lists:

💥 Thriller
🎭 Drama
☣ Science Fiction
🇺🇸 United States
1️⃣ 2010–2019 | 📆 2019
💎 Slightly Hidden Horror Gems and 🌱 Candidates
📽️ Viewing Next 🗂️ Index of Lists

Looking for something different? Consider these:

Nope | Event Horizon | Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person | Red Rooms | Requiem | Livide | Il gatto nero 1989 (The Black Cat) | Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) | La setta (The Sect) | La Chiesa (The Church) | Demoni 1 and 2 | [REC] | The Sadness | Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key | Sette note in nero (The Psychic) | La terza madre (The Mother of Tears) | ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà (The Beyond) | Black Cat: Gatto nero | All the Colors of the Dark | Tin and Tina