3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.29.20
In many ways, first-time director Andrew Patterson’s sci-fi homage is impressive.
He delivered remarkable results despite a micro-budget that recalls similar guerilla productions such as 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1981’s The Evil Dead and 1992’s El Mariachi.
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| To her surprise and mounting concern, each time Fay (Sierra McCormick) attempts to seek help in identifying a bizarre radio signal that has invaded her telephone switchboard, the call abruptly drops out. |
Patterson and his writers, James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, also evoke a strong sense of the 1950s small town New Mexico setting — the fictitious community of Cayuga — during the shoot in Whitney, Texas, where it appears the streets, businesses and inhabitants are time-locked. (I’m sure that isn’t really the case, but the verisimilitude is uncanny.)
Cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz employs the heavier grain of 1950s-era film stock, further enhancing the strong sense of time and place.
That said … allowances must be made.
This definitely looks like one of the best student films ever made. But Montague and Sanger’s narrative is best appreciated as homage, and Patterson’s directorial tics and twitches don’t always do his subtle thriller any favors. The Vast of Night — an Amazon Prime original — will be appreciated most by genre geeks who enjoy spotting the clever nods to War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and television’s original Twilight Zone.
Mainstream viewers will have trouble enduring the insufferably talky first act, and they’ll likely find such references a cute contrivance at best, atop a basic storyline that takes too long to get where it’s going.
The three earlier films cited above overcame their budgetary limitations, in great part, via momentum and tension. Patterson tries to do the same solely via mood and mild suspense; that’s much harder to pull off, and he’s not entirely successful.
Events take place during a single evening, which begins as most of the townsfolk head to the high school gym, to cheer the home-town lads during a basketball match against a tougher rival. Twentysomething Everett (Jake Horowitz), a charismatic and well-liked radio DJ at the town’s local station WOTW (get it?), makes final checks on the system that’ll record the game events for later re-broadcast.
Everett is idolized by 16-year-old Fay (Sierra McCormick), who performs in the high school band and also works nights as a local switchboard operator. She has just purchased a long-desired portable tape recorder; to her embarrassment, Everett encourages her to conduct mock interviews with the townsfolk awaiting the start of the game. (At this point, we wonder if Everett deserves his elevated standing in the community, or if he’s actually an insufferably smug jerk.)
Everett’s staccato running commentary is relentless during this first act; he simply never, ever stops talking, and he soon encourages Fay to do likewise. Their stream-of-consciousness chatter simply isn’t interesting; it’s also hard to make out much of what they’re saying, due to the budget-compromised audio.
This goes on for “only” 20 minutes, although it seems like an eternity. It also begins to feel like stalling and vamping for time, as if this is Patterson’s way of stretching his film to the still-modest 89 minutes required for a feature release.
Things improve when Everett begins his nighttime radio shift, and Fay likewise takes her place at the switchboard; she turns on a portable radio, in order to hear his show. After a few minutes, the broadcast is interrupted by a weird signal that rises and falls in odd patterns; much to Fay’s surprise, she hears the same sounds in her headphones, when one of her phone calls abruptly cuts out.
Understandably curious, she places a few of her own calls in an effort to trace the signal, or find somebody who knows what it is. Her efforts are thwarted by an escalating series of similarly dropped connections, as if somebody — something? — doesn’t want her to find out.
Nonetheless determined, Fay brings this to Everett’s attention; the two spend the next several hours dashing hither and yon — McCormick deserved hazard pay, for all the running she does! — while trying to suss out this situation. The mystery deepens via an anonymous caller to WOTW, a stash of tape reels long forgotten in the local library, and a spooky interview with an elderly woman (Gail Cronauer).
Cronauer and Bruce Davis (as the anonymous caller; we only hear his voice) bring much-needed suspense to this unfolding saga; both have a solemn, measured gravitas that nicely contrasts with the impatient intensity of Everett and Fay.
McCormick makes Fay a captivating young heroine: inquisitive, plucky and unafraid to rush in where angels fear to tread. She defers to Everett, but not entirely; if he doesn’t act quickly enough, she’ll pester him until he does. That makes her more of a 21st century character that a mid-1950s small-town girl, but McCormick successfully sells that anachronistic quality; we like her, and root for her.
Everett becomes more palatable once he shifts to inquisitive-journalist mode; Horowitz is appropriately earnest, curious and increasingly wary (unlike Fay, who leans toward recklessness).
Patterson actually opens his film with a touch that initially seems an affectionate nod: a close-up of an early-gen TV screen, which displays the title credits sequence for creepy-crawly “Zone”-esque show titled Paradox Theater, complete with a Rod Serling-esque narrator (“You are entering a realm between clandestine and forgotten”).
The movie proper then begins as a hazy, monochromatic image on this TV screen, as if we’re watching a story within a story; the picture sharpens and color slides in, as Everett strides toward the Cayuga High School gym. OK, fine: a clever, cheeky way to get us started. But the subsequent film continues to “fuzz out” back to that B/W TV style, several times as the story proceeds … and to what purpose? Are we supposed to assume that these events aren’t actually happening?
Worse yet, Patterson brings the screen to total blackness for an extended stretch of the aforementioned anonymous phone call. Again, why? This certainly doesn’t heighten the suspense; it’s actually irritating, as we impatiently wait for the picture to return.
On the other hand, Patterson and Littin Menz orchestrate the world’s most amazing single tracking shot, about 31 minutes in: a stunning feat that runs slightly more than four minutes (!), and which people will discuss for years.
It starts on Fay, enjoying a cigarette break from her switchboard duties; the camera slides alongside her, out that door and down Cayuga’s main street, bounces across several fields and past numerous houses, swooshes low through the crowded high school parking lot, then over the heads of spectators and into the gym, where it circles around the basketball game in progress, rises into the stands and then heads back outside through a tiny window, sprints back through the outskirts of town and into the WOTW studio, finally cutting as Everett answers the ringing telephone.
Like, wow. Simply amazing.
The cinematography for its own sake notwithstanding, this sequence also deftly establishes where the key players and locations are in relation to each other, just as the drama goes provocatively tilt.
Whether this and the film’s other genre winks and nods are enough to compensate for a predictable and wafer-thin story, will be up to each viewer’s patience. I’ll say this much: Despite an occasional wish that Patterson would get out of his own way, he definitely builds to an appropriately eerie finale.
Orson Welles would be proud.
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