The Vast of Night – first look review

Andrew Patterson’s incred­i­ble debut fea­ture The Vast of Night feels like a spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sor to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind. Set over the course of a sin­gle night in late 1950s New Mex­i­co, it fol­lows radio pre­sen­ter Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switch­board oper­a­tor Fay (Sier­ra McCormick), who begin to sus­pect that strange things are afoot when mys­te­ri­ous sounds dis­rupt lines and broad­casts. With the aid of callers describ­ing sight­ings of UFOs, they embark on a scav­enger hunt of sorts to get to the bot­tom of the town’s appar­ent alien activity.

The film’s evo­ca­tion of Amer­i­cana feels ful­ly realised and lived-in. James Mon­tague and Craig W Sanger’s screen­play is filled with peri­od appro­pri­ate jar­gon that nev­er sounds unnat­ur­al com­ing from the mouths of the mag­net­ic leads, while cru­cial­ly it avoids the sort of easy tar­get-hit­ting writ­ing of every Back to the Future wannabe: no utter­ance of ​‘gee-whiz’ here. The clos­est The Vast of Night comes to a pop cul­ture joke is Everett’s radio sta­tion run­ning a com­pe­ti­tion to win a car­pet sam­ple with a sup­posed con­nec­tion to Elvis Pres­ley, and that’s real­ly more a detail regard­ing how a town with a pop­u­la­tion of 492, where a teenage late-night DJ can be a local celebri­ty, engages with the wider world.

Anoth­er point of com­par­i­son is Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, which oper­ates on a sim­i­lar reg­is­ter of height­ened nos­tal­gia for a small-town yarn back­dropped by Cold War-era pol­i­tics. Both fea­ture char­ac­ters who are end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ed with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what the future holds, while slow­ly com­ing to terms with the prob­lems of the era in which they live.

The film has no on-screen POC char­ac­ters but a piv­otal bit of social com­men­tary comes from an unseen vet­er­an caller to Everett’s radio show, who gives the ama­teur sleuths a key piece of intel regard­ing a mil­i­tary con­nec­tion to the alien occur­rences. When asked why he’s nev­er spo­ken about this before, he admits he didn’t think any­one would believe him because he’s black, and that he sus­pects the same would be the case for the Mex­i­can vets who wit­nessed the same extra-ter­res­tri­al sights he did.

The Vast of Night is a film that trains you how to watch it and then sub­se­quent­ly resets its own rhythms mul­ti­ple times. Its fram­ing device, which sets up a Twi­light Zone-esque show, is imme­di­ate­ly dis­rupt­ed by an extend­ed sequence of walk­ing-and-talk­ing that’s like David Mamet writ­ing a screw­ball com­e­dy. It’s best not to spoil how for­mal­ly inven­tive the film is, which extends to the fas­ci­nat­ing score by Erick Alexan­der and Jared Bul­mer, but it’s fit­ting for a riv­et­ing and ulti­mate­ly heart­break­ing sto­ry about seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant peo­ple who are irrev­o­ca­bly changed by con­tact with big things beyond their comprehension.