Movie Breakdown: The Night (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

You know not every IFC Midnight film entirely floats my boat, but when they hit, they hit hard. And when they don’t, they’re still mostly enjoyable. So, seeing as I know almost nothing about The Night, consider me mildly curious.

Post-Screening Ramble:

Director Kourosh Ahari’s The Night is the type of horror film that leans so heavily into the mystery and the atmosphere of what’s going on, it loses itself in the obscurity. A couple (Shahab Housseni and Niousha Nour) and their newborn baby depart a party and find themselves so lost they stop for the night at a creepy hotel. The hotel, again it’s creepy, turns into a sort of labyrinth of hallucinations, with the two characters plagued by the secrets of their past. Or so I think this is what happens because Ahari never seems to want to tell the audience what’s happening. Instead the viewer is pulled along from mildly frightening moment to mildly frightening moment with only the promise of resolution as their lifeline. There’s a quote at the beginning of the film about “the multiverse” and an eerie picture of a boy staring at a boy in a mirror, but besides these clues, the film just sort of putters to a stop without any explanation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need explanation in my films. I love a murky ending, but a murky ending requires a picture to be more than dark corners, ghostly thumps in the night and a duo of protagonists who’s main intention seems to be to sleep, wake up and then run around. The Night, lost in its own intentional obscurity, never really amounts to much.

One Last Thought:

My brain has, after almost a year in pseudo-quarantine, decided that every picture was probably filmed in quarantine and that’s the reason why a film like The Night only takes place in one location and has a cast of like six. This probably isn’t true, but it helps me sleep at night.