The Vast of Night - review

With most of the world still doggedly riding the wave of retro nostalgia, an interesting question to ask is how much you can strip away from the generic Stranger Things-esque formula while still making something interesting. What are the minimum requirements for an 80s/50s/whatever mood-piece where a bunch of tech nerd kids discover a world beyond their small piece of Americana? First time director Andrew Patterson reckons you can lose quite a lot, and his impressive debut, The Vast of Night, proves him pretty much right.   

The story centres on Fay and Everett (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz) a pair of geeky teenagers beginning to feel like fleeing their 1950s rural south-Texas town. They’re both into science, communications and new technology; Fay works on the town’s switchboard while Everett is a local radio jockey. One fateful night, while the rest of the town is watching a local high school basketball game, they hear something over the airwaves that…well, its aliens. The movie doesn’t play coy about that; there’s a framing device reminiscent of the twilight zone that doesn’t serve much purpose other than to remind you that you’re watching something deliberately kitschy.

The narrative in general is sparse enough that it could be put on as a radio play, or hell, even a campfire story, but that’s not what’s compelling here. What’s compelling is watching Patterson create enough of a living, breathing world to sustain an already light story across 90 minutes with almost no budget or resources. The ingenuity of the filmmaking is really impressive, without ever drawing too much attention to itself and killing the vibe.

Patterson’s camerawork does such a good job hooking you on a spooky, enticing mood that most of the time you barely notice nothing’s going on. Almost a third of the runtime is taken up by just three shots, each meticulously observing a monologue or a mundane task, keeping just enough tension in the off-screen extra-terrestrial presence to stay engaging. It helps that the two leads are really convincing, and their dialogue is natural and free flowing, elegantly crafting believable characters without cumbersome exposition.

This won’t be for everyone, it begins to drag in the back half as the low budget novelty wears off, but I stuck with it and found myself strangely moved by the ending, which I won’t spoil here. There’s a poignant sense of melancholy to be found just under the surface, about the kids of the past that left home on a whim to find greener pastures in the great beyond of the American west, and the space they left behind. The Vast of Night might not be much more than a mood, but sometimes a mood’s all you need.              


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