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| images c/o FILMGRAB |
The film opens with a television from the era (a Philco Predicta, better known as the model for most televisions in the Fallout games) showing some kind of sci-fi anthology program very much like The Twilight Zone; we zoom in on Everett, a teenager working for the local radio station the night of a high school basketball game, somewhere in southern New Mexico in 1958. After helping set up some recording equipment, he teaches fellow classmate Fay how to use her new tape recorder as well as some show biz tricks before they begin their shifts at the radio station and the local telephone exchange, respectively. When Fay notices a strange sound that's disrupting radio and phone communications, she gets Everett to play it back over the air to see who recognizes it... and more people than you'd expect turn out to be intimately familiar with it.
The Vast of Night is not an action film. It's not really a horror film either. At best, it's a thriller, living and dying on making the most of its budget to recreate a late 1950s atmosphere, complete with period appropriate cars and fashion and nods to the media of the day: manual telephone exchanges, real-world magazines predicting the future (and being surprisingly accurate,) and radio stations set up in a shack on the edge of town. Dialogue is quick and quippy, a pitter-patter of period slang especially from Everett; it's the dialogue, and some incredible cinematography, that makes a film that's almost all talking work as well as it does. You might argue that it's a slow burn, and maybe it is, but maybe it's more accurate to say that it's a mystery that unfolds. Early on we're treated to an unbroken nine-minute shot of Fay running the switchboard and trying to track down the source of the sound disrupting the phones; under the hands of a lesser director, this would be boring, but here, it works. It's not found footage, but it's often shot like one, the camera trailing behind characters like a lost puppy. There's an eeriness to the film that persists throughout, with not even the recurring gag about a squirrel biting electric wires and causing a blackout successfully dispelling some of the spooky magic (though it does kind of drive home just how small the town is, alongside the fact that a single high school basketball game can attract nearly the entire population.)
Filmed in 2016 but not released until 2020, The Vast of Night was a drive-in sensation (remember drive-in theaters?) but never made it to conventional venues. It was picked up by Amazon and has yet to see a physical release. Patterson has moved on to bigger and better things, snapping up none other than Matthew McConaughey for last year's The Rivals of Amziah King. The Vast of Night remains trapped on Amazon, which is a shame, because despite its overuse of film grain and a pacing that might turn off more action-oriented viewers, I still think it's something Rod Serling would be proud of.
