The Vast of Night

Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.

We find ourselves back in smalltown 1950s New Mexico where a young disk jockey, Everett (Jake Horowitz) is keeping a few listeners happy while the rest of the town’s denizens are occupied watching the high school basketball derby, when his friend, the even younger Fay (Sierra McCormick), a switchboard operator, notices a weird garbled transmission hijacking the airwaves. She records it, plays it back to Everett who re-transmits it asking for submissions on what it could be. The chase for answers, mainly through two more or less monologues, will attempt to fill the eight-five minutes until the credits roll.

That’s a little more disparaging than I mean it to be, but this is in a lot of ways a slow burn of a golden age sci-fi homage that’s a bit too heavy on the slow and not enough on the burn. It does, however, do such a great job of disguising itself that it might not be too much of an issue.

For starters there’s some great character work from McCormick and Horowitz, backed up with writer/director Andrew Patterson’s naturalistic and believable dialogue and relationship setups. The period details of 50s Americana are endlessly distracting, alongside the reel-to-reel tape recorders and clunky switchboards. There some impressive technical chops on board too, with the long swooping tracking shots establishing the small town really well. In fact the eighty odd minutes of narrative went by smoothly enough that it’s maybe only writing about it that spoils it.

I should mention that it’s ultimately framed as a Twilight Zone style TV show, broadly contemporaneous to the 50s setting, which is either the reason or excuse for a lot of things that you could criticise it for. So when the answers to the questions raised turn out to be the umpteenth retelling of a hoary old sci-fi trope, that is, of course, the point of the exercise, but does not stop it being a hoary old sci-fi trope.

There’s elements of this that ultimately felt like padding, albeit consummately produced padding, but by the time the I think third long-take swoopy following shot showed up in lieu of a cut, I was kind of getting the feeling there was a bit of a struggle to reach feature length going on.

In truth, this might be better served by an fifty minute TV format, but what’s on the table before us is a very well crafted piece of niche appeal science fiction that will almost certainly light up the pleasure centres of some in a way that something like Midnight Special did. There’s a lot in here that I’m quite positive on but even as someone who’s more likely than not to like this sort of thing I’d still say it’s something I appreciated rather than out and out liked. And as such, it’s tough to give it an enthusiastic thumbs up, particularly for a broader audience.