Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 31 minutes
Director: Andrew Patterson
Quick Impressions:
It’s almost Halloween, and my husband loves true stories about unexplained phenomena and U.F.O. sightings, so when I was looking for something to watch for date night, this Twilight-Zonesque fictional tale of a strange frequency haunting a small New Mexico Town in the 1950s jumped out at me.
I think The Vast of Night was released this May, though at the time I didn’t notice because I wasn’t focusing on movies then. Apparently, though, it was filmed in 2016 which explains why lead actress Sierra McCormick appears to have barely aged since she used to jump onto our TV screen to tell us her name and remind us we were watching Disney Channel.
My daughter was a big fan of A.N.T. Farm on which McCormick memorably played the gifted but quirky Olive Doyle. (The show is full of names like that. Another character is called Paisley Houndstooth.) My daughter was an even bigger fan of Jessie, on which McCormick even more memorably guest starred as Luke’s stalker, Creepy Connie. (I was trying to remember what Disney Channel called their zany cross-overs, in which stars of one show would appear on another. I said, “It can’t be WTF Friday because it’s the Disney Channel!” Then finally I remembered– What-the-What! Weekend.)
At any rate, I like Sierra McCormick. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything but Disney Channel shows, but her repeat guest appearances on Jessie were an early highlight of that show for me. (I didn’t always like Jessie much, but then my daughter went through a phase of endless marathon binge watches and finally brainwashed me into enjoying it.)
So even though the principal cast of this film is not made up of huge movie stars, I did recognize McCormick’s top-billed name. That and the compelling premise sold us on this movie over countless other options. (Going to the theater certainly makes choosing easier! At home, you can watch pretty much anything in the world–except the likely-to-be-Oscar-nominated films you actually want to see!)
The Good:
We’ll probably end up rewatching this with our daughter because it’s exactly the kind of thing she would love.
A few summers ago, the older two kids and I watched the entirety of The Twilight Zone. My daughter recently suggested repeating this with her five-year-old brother and eagerly showed him her favorite episode, featuring Agnes Moorehead discovering strange invaders in her home, but he found it distressing.
This movie presents itself to us as a Twilight Zone episode–literally. It opens by offering us a square, black-and-white TV screen playing what is essentially the opening of the classic Rod Serling show. It gives the show a slightly different title, but little else changes. The homage is unmistakable.
And then we kind of zoom into the screen and jump back in time to a small town in New Mexico in the 1950s. So already we’re removed from reality, and the film very much has the feel of an old sci-fi show (or story).
Granted, I was never alive in the 1950s, but the setting feels completely authentic, somehow more real and familiar than 1950s reality. It’s a world that we’ve all seen dozens of times before, a 1950s TV show.
I love Disneyland, and I think Tomorrowland needs a serious overhaul and redesign. (They should really get on that while the park is closed.) But the theme of that land is currently supposed to be “yesterday’s vision of tomorrow” or “the past’s vision of the future.” It’s something like that. And this movie has that same kind of feel. It’s our conception of the past’s vision of the future. That bygone Twilight Zone era, which so often features flying saucers, is as just as engrained in our pop culture consciousness as the Old West (and at this point, probably just as heavily reinvented, romanticized, and mythologized).
So there’s something incredibly familiar about the setting. It hovers somewhere between intense realism and familiar fantasy. The small town the film offers us seems just as real as any small town that exists right now as long as we’re in the crowded gym watching the basketball game. But when we stray from the crowds, when we’re in the isolated radio station or at the lonely switchboard, then we consciously feel that we are not just in the past, but in the past in a familiar kind of story.
The characters in the film are vividly drawn, compellingly played, and highly relatable. They add both charm and realism to the story and give the whole thing a certain warmth. But the places outside the gym are cold, lonely, and odd, full of outdated, era-specific equipment, and vast empty spaces that feel eerie and unsafe.
Sierra McCormick is easy to watch in the role of Fay Crocker, the teen who watches the switch board during the high school basketball game while her operator mother is otherwise employed. She makes Fay immediately sympathetic and trustworthy, important in a movie that makes us feel on edge so much of the time. And I really love the way Fay runs everywhere. It’s an endearing character trait, and McCormick does it in such a memorable way.
McCormick’s co-lead Jake Horowitz is immensely compelling as radio DJ Everett Sloan. “He seems to be channeling Sam Rockwell,” my husband noted early on. Horowitz’s performance made me think of a high school play, not that it’s amateurish, just stagey. (Plus I didn’t act beyond high school, so when I think of the stage, I think of high school drama). He reminds me of a conspicuous star in the drama department who relishes creating a memorable character and thinks up all kinds of business for himself. He’s delightful to watch. At first I was on the verge of thinking, “Maybe you’re just a little too impressed with yourself,” but ultimately I came down on the side of, “No, you’re very charming.”
These two have good screen chemistry, and since one, the other, or both of them is almost always on screen, the movie is highly watchable.
In fact, the movie has just two other main characters (unless you count a toddler with no lines). One is Billy (Bruce Davis). We never see Davis as he delivers his lines (which actually makes his performance more challenging), but we certainly listen (on the edge of our seats) to what he has to say.
The other significant supporting role belongs to Gail Cronauer as Mabel Blanche, whose big scene in the film kind of reminds me of Betty Buckley’s sequence in The Happening (also known by me as the only remotely good part of The Happening). Cronaeur makes Blanche simultaneously scary and sad. She has some great lines to work with. Her scene makes the movie much more challenging and thought-provoking. She also ups the fear factor tremendously. What she has to say is scary and unsettling. Her delivery of her message is scary and unsettling. In fact, her very existence is scary and unsettling.
The other supporting actor I have to mention is Pam Dougherty. She just seems so real, like they just up some random faculty member walking around a high school gym in a small town and put her on camera. As she moved across the screen, my husband and I turned to one another making overlapping comments about how realistic the film seemed.
Nobody else has a very large part. (Well, there are a couple of people who turn out to be significant, but in a spoiler free review, the less said about the seemingly minor characters, the better.)
The film’s visual aesthetic is pretty captivating. The Vast of Night seems so economical. It uses little touches to great effect. My husband loved the use of shadow, and the way the camera so often trails after characters walking or glides swiftly over empty streets.
Best Scene:
For me, the movie’s opening scene is its strongest. I mean once we’ve gone inside the little TV set, and the world around us is in color.
We so quickly get invested in following Everett around, first winding through the gym, then leading Fay across the parking lot. (My husband and I were charmed by the line, “Everybody knows me. I’m Everett.” It’s something like that. I suggesting jokingly, “That was the original title.”) At the start of the movie, we’re just following Everett, and it’s an enjoyable experience. We quickly learn that Everett makes every moment captivating, whether anything is actually going on or not.
Best Scene Visually:
I like watching Fay at the switchboard. She has to do so much to learn so little. She’s there at a nexus of communication, and yet she is so isolated. As I watched, I commented, “We’re spoiled today with a cellphone always at our fingertips. Think how terrifying it would be, stuck in front of that switchboard with no idea what’s going on!”
There’s a very cool visual at the end, too.
Best Action Sequence:
Fay’s style of running is one of the most memorable elements of this movie, but the last scene that takes place in a car is certainly more exciting. In this particular film, though, I’d say that the dialogue is much more exciting than the scenes involving lots of action. This is a film about sounds. It’s sometimes better when we don’t see what makes them.
The Negatives:
My big complaint about The Vast of Night is that it sets us up for a bit more than it delivers. The atmospheric scene setting and world building at the beginning of the film is so immersive and intense. The ending just feels like a bit of a let down given the painstaking trouble the movie takes to set the scene.
Most movies I see these days are slightly overlong. If you’re being less charitable about it, they’re indulgently overlong. So often lately, I’ll watch a movie and think, “Yes, this is very cool, but it would work better if it were half an hour shorter.” But The Vast of Night is that rare film that should be half an hour longer. The set up is just so elaborate, the suspenseful story-building so measured and careful and slow. Imagine if Jurassic Park ended right after the first encounter with the T-Rex. I mean, yeah, that’s a really cool scene, and we’ve been prepped to expect it, but after such a measured, controlled build up, we expect the story to go on a little longer.
One reason why the magnificently unnerving scene with Mabel Blanche made me think of The Happening is that when I watched Betty Buckley’s brief appearance in that film, I thought, “Okay, this is pretty scary. Something is finally happening.” And then pretty much nothing else happened. There’s a lot of anticlimax going on here, too. Up to the encounter with Mabel Blanche, everything has been mysterious, vaguely eerie. Something’s going on, and (as usual) there’s a government conspiracy. But Mabel Blanche introduces a tone that is actively sinister. She also gives us so much (troubling) food for thought. As I listened to her story, I suddenly got excited, anticipating, “Oh, this is about to go somewhere boundary pushing, deep and strange.”
Honestly, I was ready for them to get another mysterious call or two. I wanted more fragments of information, more theories, each coming at things from another way. I wanted more informaton (revealed by delicious, idiosyncratic supporting characters) as I tried to piece together the whole story. For me, the movie stops too soon.
The premise has such promise. Of course, the ending is neat. I’ll give it that. (Neat in the sense that it’s not messy. Everything ties up nicely.) And the ending makes sense, too. It’s perfectly coherent and both predicted and explained by earlier events in the story. But I personally watched with the sense that the beginning was setting up something a bit more tantalizing, a bit more special than what the film ultimately gave me.
That said, if you have someone in your life who loves eerie tales but isn’t quite ready for R-rated material, The Vast of Night is an excellent option for delivering thrills and a sense of unease. That’s not to say it’s a kid’s movie. This is clearly made for adults, despite the conspicuous youth of the lead actress. And adults will enjoy this movie. It contains some thought-provoking material, and at moments, it’s genuinely scary and unsettling.
Personally, I kept hoping that we would hear more about the scandal mentioned in the beginning in the parking lot. I suppose the point of one early exchange is that Fay’s work as the telephone operator makes her privy to secrets that she does not reveal as a point of professional honor. But I wanted that to come back. I watched early on with the hope that Fay already knew something, something that seemed completely unrelated to the main plot but would later tie in somehow.
I’ll have to watch the movie again. It’s possible that some of the early lines in the gym and parking lot do foreshadow or set up what comes later in ways that I did not consider at the time because I was fixating on tracking down non-existent connections I anticipated myself. The early stuff in the gym and parking lot goes on an awfully long time. I fully expect to gasp in surprise when I watch the film a second time, noticing connections I missed because I was distracted by the wrong clues. But if that doesn’t happen, then the film doesn’t use its long prologue as efficiently as it could.
I also thought at several moments, “I don’t like this score. It’s so intrusive and self-impressed and full of strings.” But as the end credits played, I began second guessing my own judgment. Maybe the score is good, after all. Maybe on a second viewing, I would warm to it.
Overall:
The Vast of Night is a movie I’d like to see a second time. I can’t be completely sure how strong the film is without watching the beginning again after seeing the ending. If you like sci-fi and films that flirt with horror because of the questions they raise rather than the events you actually witness, then this entertaining Amazon Original is something you’ll want to check out this Halloween season. It’s streaming free with Prime.