The Vast Of Night Review: Why You Need To Watch
An unashamed love letter to 1950s B-movies and the very best Twilight Zone episodes.
After whipping up a quiet storm of approval on 2019's film festival circuit, the Amazon Films production The Vast Of Night has finally arrived on the streaming service. A tale of two teenagers who discover a mysterious signal seemingly broadcasting in their sleepy little town of Cayuga, New Mexico (population: 492), there is nothing that viewers haven't seen before in the story beats of Andrew Patterson's remarkable directorial debut, and yet the way that story is told is nothing short of masterful.
For the most part, this is an intimate film that stays close to its two main characters as they investigate the source of this signal and the stories behind it, and this adds to a feeling of isolation throughout the film. This intimacy is only broken by a single, beautiful long-shot that creeps through the entire town, climbing in and out of windows, and lingering on the basketball game that has half the town enraptured.
The Vast Of Night is a film that demands the viewer sit in a dark room, put their phone down, and pay attention. And it rewards those who do just that.
We start the film meeting Everett (Jake Horowitz), a radio personality in the small town, and Fay (Sierra McCormick), one of the young girls who work the telephone switchboard. Patterson seems to be aiming to make these two everyman characters for the purpose of the story he's telling, and he brilliantly subverts the risk of having them come across as stereotypes of 1950s teenagers early on.
We follow Fay and Everett on their way to work as they are playing around with Fay's new tape recorder, with Everett teaching her interview technique on people coming to the basketball game. A charming sequence that shows off how smart and capable these two are, we learn all that we need to know about them. Everett is brusque and protective over Fay, seeing in her strengths that she has yet to learn about herself but only capable of seeing them through the lens of his own experiences. Fay, for her part, is probably more worldly than Everett, but her youthful energy and naivety leaves her eager to please this older teen heartthrob who has taken her under his wing.
The dialogue between the two as they fight and flirt their way through the town is nothing short of engaging, and the characters are never anything but a joy to spend time with.
The mystery itself begins when Fay finds an odd signal on a telephone call (a cut-off call about something hovering over the canyon) and calls Everett for help identifying it. He plays the sounds on his radio show and the story begins. There's little action of note in the film, with Everett and Fay moving around the town and meeting people who can fill in parts of the mystery.
Two characters literally tell their stories for long periods of time, their voices hushed and inviting the viewer to lean in and listen as if the tale were being told around a camp fire. During these moments the screen often fades to grey, as if we were listening to these recorded tales later on Everett's radio show rather than watching them. In those moments when the camera is on the characters as they listen, it stays close, almost as if the camera itself is eager to hear what comes next.
For some, this will be a downfall of the film. Others will see it as a masterstroke that carefully ties into the things this film wants to talk about.
The Vast Of Night is a story about stories; about how they spread and change according to how they're told and who hears them.
Our first look at the larger world is through magazines Fay has saved articles from to show Everett. Our first look at the mystery of the film comes through calls to Fay's switchboard. As mentioned earlier, there are times when there is no picture on screen while we listen to the stories being told by traumatised survivors of abnormal events.
Less successful perhaps is the framing device that occasionally flicks to a 1950s television showing Paradox Theater, an almost perfect homage to The Twilight Zone. While there will be discussions surrounding the deeper meaning of this as a medium that picks up on a tale that has become mythic and is passed around in different formats before tales went viral, this is mostly lost in a rare misstep for an incredibly well-made film.
Ultimately, The Vast Of Night is a tale about telling stories, and it's therefore fitting that such shining new talent tell their story so wonderfully.