MIFF Session 10: THE NIGHT

Babak and Neda leave a dinner party with another couple but get lost on the drive home. When they seem to run over an animal (and then find nothing under or around the car) they decide to sleep it off at a hotel. There's the baby to think of, after all. The place they find is close by but a little dead at this predawn hour and the urbane old receptionist gives them the creeps along with the necessary stay advice. Babak, already a little stoned and drunk from dinner, gets about a second's rest before the baby wakes him and then Neda wakes him again to go down and get some hot water for the formula which he does when he's interrupted by Neda who tells him to go back to the room while she takes the baby for a stroll and he does and once back at the room tells Neda all about it. Sorry, where's the baby?

So, stories on time loops or that involve visitations from unresolved pasts can fail if they reveal themselves too early (so they mark time for most of it) or too late (so they make you scream with frustration at all those minutes you'll never know again) but if they combine this idea of redemptive punishment with an elegant approach they can be good movies. Is The Night a good movie? Yes, pretty much. The likeable couple at its centre are going to be by turns deeply confused, horrified and more by the bizarre sights and events that they come across but, as the inevitable revelations progress, they will at least understand why this is happening to them and have an idea what to do about it. What I liked especially about the plotting is that one of the backstories is never explicity explained, only suggested and, as with its central figure's response to it, left riskily to the imagination of the viewer. That's how I'll take my psychological horror, thanks.

The film is bookended by two scenes that are almost identical (but, aren't: I checked) in which Babak is at a bathroom sink wondering what to do about his toothache and what is in the mirror should not be in the mirror. While this is developing we hear a woman's voice give soft and strange commands like: "Doctor will reveal it. Mafia will kill someone." They are from a parlour game that I can barely imagine but the juxtaposition of the disembodied voice, the dark room and the visible if slight pain is unsettling. Similarly, the way the old hotel interiors are constantly eerie. This story reminded me of another time loop tale from the early twentieth century that I found in a book of vintage horror in the library at home which was just the kind of thing I liked to chill down a tropical summer. In it a pair of doomed lovers must return to their worst day. It got into my eleven year old's zapping brain and settled in for life. So, maybe I have a predilection but I thoroughly enjoyed The Night's take on it.