Low-budget film noir like a Twilight Zone episode
Print Edition
“THE Vast of Night,” a micro-budget film noir set in 1950s New Mexico, crackles with B-movie electricity.
It’s one of those little miracles — a directorial debut made for almost nothing that establishes a young filmmaker of self-evident command. With atmosphere and cunning, director Andrew Patterson steers “The Vast of Night” through the soft, shadowy night air of a small and quaint borderland town where unseen mysteries lurk.
The setup may sound vaguely familiar and it is. “The Vast of Night” is framed as an episode of “Paradox Theater,” a “Twilight Zone” knockoff that opens by warning the TV viewer “You are entering the realm between the clandestine and the forgotten.”
But “The Vast of Night” is more than the pastiche it pretends to be and shows plenty of B-movie panache. The film was a festival hit last year after it premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. Amazon subsequently began streaming the film. It has also been playing at a handful of drive-in theaters, where its period setting and old-fashioned sci-fi intrigue make it quite possibly the most drive-in-ready movie of the pandemic.
The film also works well when watched at home.
It takes place during the first high-school basketball game of the season in Cayuga, New Mexico.
The game has drawn most of the town’s 492 people to the gym, where the camera trails Everett (Jake Horowitz), a fast-talking student and radio DJ who already looks and sounds ready to join Edward R. Murrow at CBS.
He’s showing Fay (Sierra McCormick), a 16-year-old switchboard operator with a new audio recorder, some of the basics of reporting as they circle the gym and the already-bustling parking lot. They’re both bright, ambitious teenagers in dark-framed glasses.
Fay excitedly recounts the future predictions of a magazine article that forecast “vacuum-tube transportation” and telephone numbers assigned at birth. While strolling on a quiet, dark lane beneath leafy trees and talking of a semi-true future, they seem momentarily out of time.
Patterson and cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz conjure the feeling that something is indeed in the air — something that momentarily crosses with the frequency of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast, before the signal cuts out.
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