Review: THE VAST OF NIGHT

An antique tv in what looks like a VR version of a 50s dream home plays the opening credits of a show called Paradox Theatre. The narration will remind anyone who knows the voice of Rod Serling of the watershed show Twilight Zone. After an opening sequence within the opening sequence we segue from a 1950s opening shot to a full colour scene as young local small town DJ Everet walks through the local high school refectory as the preparations gear up for a basketball game attended by what seems the whole town. There's an anomaly people are talking about concerning a power outage and the squirrel at its cause. Everet is tailed by Fay, local teen switchboard operator who wants him to show her how to work her new fangled portable tape recorder. He heads to the station for his shift and she to the exchange for hers. She records a weird noise heard from a strange call which she relays to Everet at the station who broadcasts it, asking if anyone knows what it is. He gets a call from someone who does.

The rest is plot that you are best discovering for yourselves in this pleasing flight into belief and disbelief, of possible new technology vs induction form alien suggestion and so on. This film delights in a decent grab bag of issues that twist reality and reality-warping potential into its own story telling machine as we grapple with the bakelite and vacuum tube realm of the cold war and its jittery paranoia and the list of technology that Fay has gathered from science fiction that the contemporary viewer would recognise as normal.

All the while, we are given some muscular moments whereby the caller to the station, Billy, is often heard against a black blank screen, the way we'd hear him if we were listening to the radio. A further call takes Fay and Everet to an old woman who reveals more of the influence of the aliens and is convinced that they are overhead this night. She also has a tale of belief and disbelief. Ultimately it will be up to Everet and Fay to get to the truth.

This film, which plays smoothly on the notions of admitted fiction and engaging tale-spinning, is happy to build effective atmosphere and then squeeze it into the confines of an old sci-fi tv show, giving us either something too rich to engage with or inviting us into something that will bid us write our own ending. As such it might well leave a lot of viewers hoping for a proto-X-File feeling let down by the linearity of the conclusion. The themes of veracity and recording that precede the ending might easily be swept aside as the conventional race to the final act seems to promise a more spectactular reveal than we get.

But I would caution against that and suggest a second viewing. There is a treasure of playful thought on screen here and, even though it keeps telling you it's about the other, the lie, the coverup, the intrigue, it can rest softly and warmly assured that it has told you about what you might demand of a tall tale, what fact, what record.


The Vast of Night might still be available for free in a free trial of Amazon Prime as you read this. I just wish I'd seen it at a cinema.