The Vast Of Night
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It's so weird to be watching The Vast Of Night almost right after No One Will Save You. One movie has no dialogue, while the other is just dialogue. To be honest, it might seem very strange to make a film so dialogue heavy, if we didn't have people like Quentin Tarantino who shows time and time again that movies with a lot of dialogue can work fantastically.
The Vast Of Night is one of those movies. Which is kind of amazing, considering that this is the first film written and directed by Andrew Patterson.
This movie is also about the UFO phenomenon like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind or No One Will Save You, but this one works on a different level. Close Encounters has a scene in the style which The Vast Of Night uses throughout, where a radar operator talks to pilots that see a very bright object go pass them in the sky. And the tension is build primarily by sound. The Vast Of Night expands upon this concept in a very interesting way.
I don't know how it worked at all, but Patterson threw the concept of "Show, Don't Tell" out of the window. And the movie sometimes even just shows a black screen when an important audio plays. So you would concentrate on the audio and not on the image.
To be frank, the movie was self financed by Patterson, and he had very little money to make this film. So perhaps he had to work with the limitation of being unable to show certain things, and thus used audio more heavily. But the writing that Patterson and Craig W. Sanger did on this movie is so good, you don't care that you don't see nothing.
In some ways this approach worked even better than the one in No One Will Save You. This time I was properly terrified. To the point that it was hard to get to sleep, because I was constantly hearing noises that I interpreted could come from something out of this world. Two of my alarm clocks were slightly out of sync for example, and this terrified me. I totally enjoyed it! Don't get me wrong. This was fun! But damn. No One Will Save You didn't have this kind of effect on me. But The Vast Of Night is simply magical when it comes to it.
But this over-reliance on audio doesn't mean that the visuals are not good. To be honest, this movie gave the director plenty of room to show off. Almost every second shot of this film is showy. We start with a very elaborate choreography of an entire town-full of people in one area. Then there is an almost 10 minute long single unbroken shot of Fey ( the switch board operator played by Sierra McCormick ) where she is answering strange calls. And this scene is amazing! Then literally the next shot goes for another 4 minutes where the camera travels from the switch board where she was sitting, through the town, into a very crowded basketball game, then out of it, and to a radio station where the other main character Everett played by Jake Horowitz is. This directors shows off like crazy. And given that the movie is self funded, this is truly impressive stuff. Also the whole film is a period piece set in the 60s. With clothing and tech and cars from that era. How the hell did he manage all of it with his own money?
At times the cheapness of the movie and the inexperience of the director actually shows through. The black levels in this film are way above the black. Which is a stylistic decision that I can understand. I did similar bullshit on I'm Not Even Human. But it is a bit in your face. Especially when the film cuts to black, so you would concentrate on the audio. But you see the black bars above and below the image and it is a bit distracting. In a few places he breaks the 180 rule without properly transitioning and without an intend to confuse the audience. In the showy shot that goes through the town, in the section in the basketball game, the camera movement is largely unmotivated by anything in the frame. Spielberg would not have done something like that, though the shot is still very impressive. And the color correction sometimes doesn't match between the shots.
The acting in the movie is ridiculously good. Line delivery of the actors is flawless. There is not a lot of dramatic acting. Like there is fear in people's faces. And one old woman played by Gail Cronauer actually has a lot of pain in her character, which is perhaps the most dramatic scene. But nobody cries is this movie. It's not about sentimentality. It's about mystery and fear. And with what the actors were given, they did a very good job acting their asses off.
Spoiler
The movie shows the alien ship in the end. Confirming that those are really aliens, and not people going crazy. To be honest, I wanted the movie to end on the mystery. Where nobody actually knows exactly what was going on. But I guess, this was always a UFO movie for Patterson, so I can understand that. Surprisingly, the flying saucer doesn't look bad at all. It's not the mother-ship from Close Encounters, but the effect are convincing.
If you are into feeling a good paranoia and cosmic dread at night, I would suggest you watching this movie before going to sleep.
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