The Vast Of Night (2019) This very modest but hugely ambitious indie film knocked 'em dead at the Slamdance Film Festival four years ago.
Finally, after the film parked forever on Amazon Prime, I caught up with it on the Freevee streaming site. (Yeh, plenty of ad breaks, but hey it's free) And I fully understand how it wowed the festival folk at Slamdance. It dazzled me too.
For director Andrew Patterson, it's the quintessential "calling card" movie......a film that announces to the world, "Here I am....with a ton of talent, creativity and visual directing chops to make your eyes go pop."
(I can only hope and pray this rising star doesn't get sucked into blowing 200 million on one of those now worn-out Marvel superhero snoozers.....which are beginning to bore the hell out of even the fanboys 'n girls....)
He certainly made my eyes to pop with this sci-fi suspense thriller that mashes up, with a knowing Speilberg-ian cleverness, an elongated "Twilight Zone" episode. Also in the mix - "The X-Files", "Signs", "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", and every grim alien abduction thriller you've ever seen steeped in paranoid fear and loathing of Area 51 government conspiracies.
All of this stuff, a sci-fi fan's dream come true, is packaged up not only with some literally breathtaking cinematics, but with a classic film's buff's appreciation for simply letting an actor's bravura solo work provide all the special effects required.
It's 1958 in the tiny remote town Cayuga, New Mexico. On a Friday night, whole town's crowded into the high school gym for a big basketball game. But two people have to work - Everett (Josh Horowitz) the town's young motormouthed, all-night radio station DJ and his teenage gal pal Fay (Sierra McCormick) the town's telephone operator and excited owner of a new portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Horowitz and McCormick, the two beating hearts and souls of this movie, do superb work together as this oddest of couples. From the first minute on, you sense that their Everett and Fay are joined at the hip as Cayuga's nerdy outcasts.'.....he, the fast talking know-it-all and she, with her enormous cat's-eye glasses, brimming with news of future scientific wonders gleaned from 'Popular Mechanics'. You'll need to stay extra alert to catch their overlapping, lightspeed dialogue exchanges, which make the byplay of Robert Altman's ensemble casts sound half-asleep in comparison
In a sequence that every actor dreams of doing, the camera holds on Fay for a lengthy sustained take as she furiously goes about her business of plugging and unplugging multiple cables to connect phone callers. But what's that weird otherworldly electronic static coming from one of her phone lines? Let the dread begin.....
Fay enlists Everett in hunting the source of the noise.....and it doesn't take long for a couple of Everett's listeners reveal their unsettling, sad and downright scary encounters with the originators of the noise........something unknown. Something not of this earth. And something currently hovering over Cayuga.
Director and co-writer Patterson, while unafraid to let his camera settle on his actors for extended quietly powerful monologues, also loves making your jaw drop with a spectacular camera shot that glides in and out of the entire town, from the eerie silent streets to the crowded basketball game and back again. It will .probably stand as the ultimate of the many homages to Orson Welles's legendary opening tracking shot in "Touch Of Evil"......(the shot that inspired who knows how many young viewers to become film directors....)
And best of all, even with its obvious low budget, the film manages to deliver the kind of finale it's been promising all along. But unlike Speilberg's uplifting, awe-inspiring "Close Encounters" climax, ."The Vast Of Night stays true to itself....maintaining its aura of fearful mystery and the unease of unknowable forces beyond our comprehension. (You'll hear no dreamy John Williams orchestration of "Wish Upon A Star" in this 3rd kind encounter)
So in case you haven't figured out BQ's opinion yet.....surprise, surprise, this film's a platinum-plated 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS. And now that Amazon's freed it up on Freevee, it's not to be missed. One of BQ's best streaming views of the year.
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