The Vast of Night

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/Sjqv6iKZTwc

Growing up watching The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and terrifying my childhood self by reading books about UFOs and aliens, its fair to say that I have a bit of a soft spot for a good story about what's in the skies above us. For this reason, the trailer for Amazon's The Vast of Night caught my eye.

Here's the official description of what this movie is all about:

At the dawn of the space-race, two radio-obsessed teens discover a strange frequency over the airwaves in what becomes the most important night of their lives and in the history of their small town.

I recommended this to a friend after watching it and this is how I summed it up:

Small town New Mexico, 1950s. While the whole town is at a basketball game, the girl running the local switchboard and the guy at the radio station start getting weird signals coming through their earphones, and reports start to come in about something in the sky...

I loved this movie, there's something so great about its simplicity. I think its a good example of how a lot can be done with very little. This was made for under a million dollars but hits like something with a much bigger budget.

The way they've made things work within the budget are accomplished by a few simple tricks. Firstly, the events covered in the movie happen over a few short hours on one night in one small town, so the scale is kept small.

Additionally there are some fantastic long takes throughout the film including one magnificent one where the camera goes from the desk of the switchboard office out the door, down the street, right across town, across a field and into the stadium where the basketball game is happening. It was so smoothly executed that our eyes just got wider and wider the longer it went on. It was marvellous.

Lastly there are some long periods where there is just one or two people talking. Now, usually long dialogue heavy scenes with the camera lingering on one person get very boring very quickly, but the way the lines are delivered and the contribution of the content of the dialogue to the developing story of the movie was masterfully executed. It's almost hard to believe that this is the first film made by Director Andrew Patterson. The skill on display here feels like its someone who has spent years crafting engaging and well fleshed out stories.

Tie this in with the sound design, cinematography, and colour grading of this being immaculate, and we thoroughly enjoyed this. It does a brilliant job of slowly building up tension without flashy visuals or on screen pizazz. It’s done with intriguing dialogue that pulls you into the mystery.

We were fully on board the whole time, and I reckon you should check it out too.

The Vast of Night (2020) is a spiritual successor to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. This film understands the power of the spoken word (its heroes are a late night DJ and a phone operator), and puts it to great use to tell a fascinating story that relies more on the viewer’s imagination than on visual effects.

This is the rare low-budget ($700,000) sci-fi flick that doesn’t strive to mask its technical shortcomings with a layer of shoddy CGI, instead focusing on a character and dialogue-driven plot. This is not a cheap movie, but an economic one — austere, even; a ‘less is more’ approach that turns at times into 'nothing is better.’

Co-writer/director Andrew Patterson isn’t trying to convince us that his aliens are real, but neither does he expose them to unforgivably prying eyes; sticking to the Lovecraftian definition of fear, Patterson wisely makes them conspicuous precisely by their absence (only at the very end do we see the outline of a spaceship, a convincing shot not least because it takes place under cover of night).

The Vast of Night works because it isn’t about the visceral horror caused by a monster from outer space as it is about the psychological terror of the unknown — what we can’t see but sense is there, lurking in the dark, watching us.