One upside to sheltering in place is a number of movies that otherwise would have gotten small cinematic releases instead came out to various streaming services and potentially greater exposure. One such movie is the indie sci-fi flick The Vast of Night, now included for anyone with Amazon Prime Video.
Running a compact 90 or so minutes and featuring a cast of no-name actors, the movie marks the directorial feature debut of Andrew Patterson. I’ve seen it, and now I’ve got some opinions.
Using a bit of a framing device that the whole movie is part of a fictional vintage TV show of the Twilight Zone/Outer Limits variety, the movie follows two teenagers. Young science enthusiast Fay (Sierra McCormick) works part time as a switch board operator and has a new tape recorder to play with. Her friend Everett (Jake Horowitz) is a DJ for the local radio station who knows a bit more about how to use her recorder than she does. The movie opens with the pair leaving their high school where a big basketball game is playing out for their small 1950s New Mexico town, talking about various articles Fay read in magazines like Scientific America where she talks about predictions for things like pocket-sized personal telephones and the like.
Yeah, it is that kind of movie, but it plays that sort of stuff with a sense of cool irony that made the scene fun.
As it is, Fay soon goes to work and at one point hears and odd noise coming through her headset. She can’t get ahold of the person who called her and eventually calls Everett to see if he can figure out what that weird noise is. Everett can’t either, but the two do figure something out: the sound seems to be coming from the sky. Everett asks his listeners, few due to the aforementioned basketball game, and the answers the pair gets lead to knowledge that they maybe didn’t want to actually have.
I dug this. Patterson’s camera work has a graceful feel at times, as seen with one really cool shop that goes from Fay having a smoke break outside her switchboard’s telephone exchange building across town, lingering on the basketball game, and finally stopping at Everett having his own smoke break outside the radio station. The movie gives off a good feel if not of authentic 1950s America then at least what many people think it does. Fay and Everett make for a good pair, both of them simultaneously dorky and cool, and the only two who seem to figure out what’s going on, and the answer is a bit terrifying. Between the atmosphere, the setting, and the story, this was a fun flick worth checking out.
Grade: A-
0 Comments