While not taking anything away from the performances in this feature directorial debut from Kourosh Ahari, which are quite strong, particularly from Shahab Hosseini (A Separation), the bona fide star in The Night is the sound editing. It follows Iranian-American couple Babak (Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Jafarian) along with their one-year-old daughter, who, after a night of drinks and dinner at a friends house, find themselves trapped, unable to leave a mysterious hotel that hungers for their secrets.

Maz Makhani's cinematography deliberately accentuates the hotel's unnatural presentation, boosting the film's general ambience as dark rooms and shadows become the dominant order of the day. The script utilises classic motifs of the horror genre, many of which are now unfortunately eligible…

Thanks to Film Independent for the screening of this movie. Its technical qualities are far and away where its strengths lie, utilizing many effective camera and framing tricks to create a claustrophobic, hellishly dreamlike sensation without distracting from the more simplistically creepy nature of what happens. As for the reasons why it’s happening, they do work, even though there isn’t anything that deep to it in the end. The film effectively conveys throughout how troubled this marriage is, but the payoff, while great on paper, is a little too simplistic in its execution to make all the time spent feel completely worthwhile. I do like the ending, though, and how it suggests that the real inescapable terror for the main…

I wanted to love this movie, but I am annoyed by the unnecessary anti-abortion storyline, and it kind of soured me on the whole movie. I know everyone handles things differently, but equating the abortion secret to Babak being a garbage person overall (including his secret of cheating, and I'm still not entirely clear on if he killed someone or not) seemed out of line. I was annoyed by one of the ghosts being the full-grown child that "could have been" haunting Neda for what she did, and for not telling her husband when they weren't even together when it happened. Nope.

I really liked this movie until it went in this direction. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm so…

Wow. In the last 24 hours I have watched two completely different horror films that exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, but which both typify the absolute worst tendencies of the genre on video on demand. I haven't logged the other one yet, but I just finished The Night, and oh god what the fuck? This film is 100 minutes of people walking down dark hallways. There is about ten minutes, no, five minutes, of actual story here, and the rest is "hallways horror", a trend I have been decrying in my Letterboxd reviews for years now. The last half hour of The Night literally follows the main character walking through various hallways of a creepy hotel, then down…