The Vast of Night.
– A rich 2020 sci-fi film with an excellent direction.
JUST A FEW WORDS (IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT):
The Vast of Night is the first film directed by Andrew Patterson. And what a first film it is!
Let’s start by highlighting the very interesting meta-reflective trait of this film with the beginning of the film that winks at The Twilight Zone and makes the understanding of the type of film we’re going to attend extremely clear. With a subtle threshold between reality and unreality that will be eroded, the film is based on a really high quality of writing (in particular of the dialogues).
The layer that really impressed us is the staging: the direction is ambitious, makes each scene interesting to watch, works all the material as if it were unique and makes the most of it by offering a chain of non-trivial approaches: from the camera in constant movement to moments when the it is held still to increase the degree of suspense and adherence to the characters; there’s a particular use of blacks to make the sound attract more attention and focus on the things said; in addition, in the first part of the film, to the viewer is forbidden the access to the faces of the protagonists, favoring an introduction of the characters that leverages spectatorial curiosity.
The risk is clearly that of a frayed work, which does not keep a thread, but instead we find ourselves in front of an alert, attentive direction, which knows the rules of the game and attacks them frontally, plays with them and changes them organically with respect to the concept and reaches the achievement of making the film lively and the viewer curious to know what can happen next.
Nor does it hide an allegorical degree, especially with social references, when it comes to “the people in the sky” and the way life on planet Earth continues to flow normally despite everything – in a metaphor that tells what we have become nowadays.
Perhaps it is in some not extremely original narrative wrinkles that a little weakness of the film is revealed, if one can speak of such, but it rarely happens (nowadays) to be watching such a well-shot work: in fact with The Vast of Night, Andrew Patterson demonstrates to be an extremely interesting emerging director and we are really curious to see what he will do next.
PROS:
- Excellent Filmmaking.
- Dialogues.
- Characters introduction.
CONS:
- Ending: it was a little disappointing as sort of predictable.
- The degree of originality of the “story” which has a lot (too many) reverbs in other genre films and events such as Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds radio happening.
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GENERAL INFO:
6.7
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