‘Vast of Night’ a confident sci-fi throwback
The exciting science-fiction thriller,“The Vast of Night” makes its referential intentions clear from the beginning.
It opens on a retro black-and-white TV displaying the opening titles of a “Twilight Zone” like television program. The camera pushes into the screen and slowly turns to color as the story begins in proper, but the framing device returns throughout the film’s brisk 90-minute runtime.
With or without the visual reference, “The Vast of Night” plays out like an above average “Twilight Zone” episode laced with Spielbergian scope. It evokes “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and does so on a shoestring budget.
An assured and thrilling feature debut from director Andrew Patterson, “The Vast of Night” focuses on two teenagers in a small New Mexico town, circa 1950. Radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) notice a strange radio frequency one night while most of the town attends a high school basketball game.
The film takes time to establish the friendship between these two audiophiles - Everett is a bit of a talky know-it-all, while the more tactful Fay shows infectious exuberance whenever their discussions turn to new technology and the promise of a more exciting future. Patterson tracks a long discussion between the two while they traverse the small town on foot, and the stillness of the quiet town feeds the film’s intensity once some strange things begin to bump in the night.
Patterson’s camerawork makes stellar use of the darkness, framing dynamic images using street lights and the vast starlit sky. Sound, predictably, plays a key role in the film’s slowly-increasing intensity. There are two extended sequences where Everett and Fay listen to stories told by people who have heard the mysterious frequency before, and the click of a disconnected phone conjures anxiety as well as even the most effective jump scares.
Something big is happening in this small town, and “The Vast of Night” fuels anticipation by keeping Everett and Fay at arm’s length from the action. Patterson lets their imaginations run wild, which invites the audience to feed into a similar paranoia.
Perhaps because of its budget limitations, “The Vast of Night” can’t quite deliver a climax that matches the setup. When the movie ends, you want about an hour more of story, which can be both exciting and infuriating depending on how well you tolerate ambiguity.
With two crackling lead performances, an eerie atmosphere and a sure-handed approach to ratcheting tension, “The Vast of Night” suggests a promising career for Patterson (and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger). It’s got that early Spielberg/early Shyamalan spark with an old school Hitchcockian story sense. It’s the perfect experience for a warm summer night, especially in a market starved for cinematic scope.
“The Vast of Night” is streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers.
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com. He’s been writing professionally about movies since 2000 and is the co-host of Old Millennials Remember Movies, available everywhere you get podcasts and at OldMillennialsRemember.com.
