As The Vast of Night opens, the camera pushes in on an old-fashioned black-and-white TV with a small oval screen. A voice that sounds very much like Twilight Zone creator/host Rod Serling delivers a monologue that sounds very much like the opening narration of a Twilight Zone episode, but this is actually Paradox Theater, and, the narrator tells us, tonight’s episode is titled The Vast of Night. Thus director Andrew Patterson and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger set the tone for their impressively crafted feature debut, a micro-budget movie that owes as much to old radio serials (and modern narrative podcasts) as it does to sci-fi TV anthologies.
The picture expands into widescreen color from the flickering black-and-white TV image, and Patterson’s camera follows teenagers Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) and Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick) in a flurry of motion and chatter around a high school basketball game about to begin in the small town of Cayuga, New Mexico. It’s sometime in the late 1950s, and Everett is a nighttime DJ at the local radio station, while Fay works the night shift at the town switchboard. Twilight Zone-style intro aside, the beginning of the movie feels like it’s setting up a hyper-literate high school romantic comedy, with Everett and Fay (who are clearly smitten with each other but too awkward to say so) both talking at a rapid pace as he advises the school broadcasters on how to record the night’s play-by-play and teaches Fay how to use her brand new tape recorder.
The broadcast equipment and the tape recorder are just two examples of the movie’s almost fetishistic fascination with vintage technology, and Fay peppers Everett with info from her favorite science magazines, which predict developments including versions of self-driving cars, bullet trains and cell phones by sometime between the 1970s and the 1990s. Once Everett and Fay part ways to head to their respective jobs, the story shifts into full sci-fi mode, as Fay hears a strange noise over one of the phone lines, and that same noise interferes with Everett’s radio broadcast. Soon Fay is getting calls from town residents reporting some strange objects in the sky. Could it be aliens?
Obviously yes, but The Vast of Night isn’t really about encountering extraterrestrials. It’s about two wide-eyed teenagers rushing to find out the truth, literally running around town to figure out what’s going on. Patterson, whose background is in directing local commercials in his native Oklahoma, makes the most of his limited resources with bravura camera work that sometimes involves elaborate tracking shots. One shot early in the movie, for example, swoops all the way across town from the switchboard to the high school to the radio station, gliding just above the ground like a stalking animal. However, Patterson also sometimes uses long static takes that focus just on the expressive actors. McCormick’s best moment in the movie comes during a single, nearly 10-minute take in which Fay breathlessly makes and takes calls, trying to track down information about the mysterious signal.
As Patterson and cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin-Menz deliver elaborate visual flourishes, the movie just as often evokes the feel of an old-time radio drama, or a podcast like Welcome to Night Vale or Limetown. When Everett plays the mysterious sound on the radio, asking for help from the community, he gets a call from a man identifying himself only as Billy (Bruce Davis), who tells a long story about his experience working on a mysterious military compound somewhere in the desert. Billy is just a disembodied voice on the phone, and for parts of his tale, Patterson simply cuts to black, removing all visuals and allowing the audience to envision what Billy is talking about.
Later, Everett and Fay track down an elderly woman named Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), who lives on the outskirts of town and has her own story about what she believes is an alien encounter, which she tells in another long, unbroken take. Combine that with the extensive use of phone calls and radio broadcasts to move the plot along, and The Vast of Night probably could have been an audio-only story and still have evoked the same eerie, retro vibe. Horowitz and McCormick give strong performances that go beyond just delivering lines, but some of the movie’s visuals come close to gimmickry to make up for the lack of onscreen action.
Still, it’s better to see a small-scale movie like this with too much artistic ambition than not enough, and the filmmakers keep the pacing brisk, with brief returns to the black-and-white TV to indicate act breaks, or maybe where a commercial would go if this were actually a vintage TV broadcast. The mystery is reminiscent of a long tradition of sci-fi series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files to Black Mirror, and it’s a bit disappointing when it mostly fizzles out rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion.
As the characters talk in circles, The Vast of Night spins its wheels a bit, and what could have been fascinating at, say, the length of a TV episode, gets a little repetitive at feature length. Even so, the stylish filmmaking and charismatic stars make this breakout indie success (which went from winning the Slamdance Film Festival to being branded an Amazon original) worthy of the hype.
Starring Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Bruce Davis and Gail Cronauer, The Vast of Night premieres Friday on Amazon Prime.