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‘The Vast of Night’ Review: There’s More to Fear Than Fear Itself
In a small New Mexico town in the 1950s, an eerie throbbing sound and a lot of questions send two friends in search of answers.
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‘The Vast of Night’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director andrew patterson discusses a switchboard sequence from his science-fiction drama featuring sierra mccormick..
“I’m Andrew Patterson, and I’m the director of ‘The Vast of Night.’ So the actress here is Sierra McCormick, and she’s playing Fay, who is all by herself with the 500 members of her town all at a basketball game. So the movie is set in November of 1958, and the setting is in a fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico.” [STRANGE SOUND] “And the first thing that happens in this scene is you hear a very new sound. We wanted the sound in particular to be new in cinema. And so we worked pretty hard at mixing a number of elements together, and then Fay responds to it in a way that initially is— it frames it as a viewer. Like you see that she doesn’t understand it, and even though she’s not threatened by it, she certainly starts taking immediate action.” “Hello? Hello? Hello?” “Listen, ma’am, can you disconnect and then try again? It’s all—” ””— calling, and it’s a strange, large object holding over my land off and on, like a tornado. Please send the police.” “Ma’am, is this an emergency?” “All of that frames your relationship to the sound. All of that kind of creates a tension that is a setup in this scene. And hopefully as a viewer you’re looking for the resolution just like Fay, the switchboard operator, is. And what we were aiming to do was, in her performance, not go to the extreme that you would probably expect in this scene from if you were watching a horror film or you were watching a different kind of genre. We wanted her to be very grounded and continue to be the stand-in for the viewer. And we worked on that by heavily rehearsing her performance. This is actually the scene Sierra chose to audition with. And from the time that she auditioned with it to the night when we got this shot, we pulled it way, way, way back because we knew that the film itself, we didn’t want to steal away the magic of where the film was going to go by having a large performance here. On set, there is no sound being played. The sound was a year away from being created at that point. And so she’s just playing to an AD reading lines very dryly in the room but not necessarily in a way that you can play off of as an actor. So it truly was both the sound and the people on the other end of the line were yet to be cast and yet to be created. So there’s no— Sierra had to very much do this on her own, reading against someone that has no training in acting.” ”—went away. I just wanted to see if it—” “Just call Everett” “Well, I don’t want to disturb—” “I think the only thing I told her as a director was this is something that is entrancing. It’s mesmerizing. It’s not scary. It’s not threatening. And if anything, it’s the thing that’s going to take you down the rabbit hole.” [STRANGE SOUND]
By Manohla Dargis
Something weird this way comes — and keeps on coming — in “The Vast of Night.” It’s sometime in the 1950s in Cayuga, a fictional New Mexico town filled with deepening shadows, cruising cars and roaming teenagers. Everyone is heading toward the high school, where girls in saddle shoes will soon cheer boys dribbling across the court. It’s evening again in America, and things are about to get murky and eerie and strange.
A small-scale movie that flexes plenty of filmmaking muscle, “The Vast of Night” is the story of a town, a country and an addled state of mind that can feel awfully, aptly, familiar. At its center are Fay (Sierra McCormick) and Everett (Jake Horowitz), his-and-her nerds as matched as salt-and-pepper shakers. They’re curious, plucky, excitable and talkative, and each has a night gig — she works as a switchboard operator, he works as a D.J. at the local radio station — which is why they’re not at the game. (They’re friendly with each other, but it’s a relief they’re not romantically inclined.)
Fay is working alone at the switchboard (“number please”) when she first hears the sound , an unidentifiable and scratchy electronic throb. It’s the great whatsit in a progressively odd night punctuated by cryptically dropped calls and flashes of light. At one point, a woman phones in yelling about something , the sky, her land (“we’re going in the cellar”), her strained voice dropping in and out as a dog frantically barks and the sound creepily pulsates. With an increasingly furrowed brow, Fay calls Everett at the station. Deciding that it will make for good radio, he asks her to route it to the station so he can play it on the air, a decision that soon pushes the story into woo-woo terrain.
Making good use of limited resources and a script by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, the director Andrew Patterson sets much of the story in claustrophobic rooms and spaces so open the threat could come from any direction (including above). He has strong support — the score and sound design are exemplary — as well as a feel for how to box characters in and for the spookiness of long nights. The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.
Like Nancy Drew and one of her Hardy Boy pals, Fay and Everett chase down the sound, mirroring our questions and confusion. They track clues and race through the night, and try to piece together a puzzle that remains tantalizingly beyond their grasp. It’s clear that something is out there, but what? Given that it’s the middle of the Cold War it’s no surprise that Everett bets early on the Soviets, though you may be thinking about another kind of alien invasion. Certainly the radio station’s call sign — WOTW — set in glowing red letters, suggest that what’s menacing the town is close kin to what panicked souls in 1938 during Orson Welles broadcast of “ The War of the Worlds .”
“The Vast of Night” is heavily front loaded and begins far stronger than it ends. It opens with the camera prowling toward a TV in an empty living room, where a show in the vein of “The Twilight Zone” is flickering to a start. “You’re entering the realm between clandestine and forgotten,” a Rod Serling-esque voice promises. And then the strobing blue visuals give way to the denser, more richly colored movie proper, which then takes off like a shot. Like the nod to Welles, this invocation of Serling sets the paranoid stage and also serves as a reminder that one of our greatest national traits is thoroughly freaking ourselves with threats both imagined and real.
The Vast of Night
Rated PG-13 for intimations of danger. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Amazon .
Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis
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