The Vast of Night (2020)
dir. Andrew Patterson
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2020 Amazon Studios
With his debut feature, The Vast of Night, first-time director Andrew Patterson made me feel the way I felt the first time I saw Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Patterson’s movie isn’t as polished as Close Encounters. It’s much smaller in scale and resources. Patterson, who self-funded Vast of Night with money from his television commercial production company, made the movie on a micro-budget of $700,000 over four weeks. Still, there is a sense of awe and wonder to the picture that put me in mind of Close Encounters. It’s a stunning first effort.
Imagine if you will a tiny New Mexico town called Cayuga at the tail end of the 1950s, that decade of seemingly limitless possibilities. I use that Rod Serling phrase because Vast of Night owes a big debt to Serling’s work. The weakest thing about the movie is that Patterson, who co-wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym James Montague with Craig W. Sanger, frames it as an episode of a Twilight Zone-esque television program called Paradox Theater. The movie begins with a slow tracking shot of an old ‘50s-era television set. The TV is playing Paradox Theater.
Tonight’s episode, we’re told, is The Vast of Night. We then move into the TV, so that the movie we’re watching becomes the world of the TV show. It’s a neat framing device that Patterson goes back to throughout the movie – periodically during the story, the movie transitions back to the old 50s TV screen for a few minutes, to remind us we’re watching a sci-fi show – but the film would have felt more immediate if Patterson had let it stand on its own.
The movie centers around young radio disc jockey Everett and his friend and audio tech protégé Fay, a high school student who works part time as a telephone switchboard operator. The first act shows us Everett helping some colleagues who are preparing to record a broadcast of the local Cayuga high school basketball game for later playback on the radio. It feels like the whole town is attending the game, with Everett heading back to the tiny radio station to host his nightly show, and Fay preparing for her shift at the telephone switchboard.
Everett and Fay investigate a series of bizarre events when Fay detects a strange sound coming over one of the phone lines. In an effort to, in 2020 terminology, crowdsource an explanation for the sound, Everett broadcasts the eerie signal over the radio, hoping a listener will call in with information. This sets off a chain reaction with cosmic implications.
It’s a simple enough story, but Patterson layers his sci-fi tale with an engrossing atmosphere and masterful, how’d-they-do-that filmmaking technique, especially considering the production’s shoe-string budget. Patterson’s camera virtually never stops moving. The first half of his movie is a virtuoso tracking shot that lithely moves between the high school gym, the local radio station, and Fay’s telephone switchboard office. These quick but smooth Steadicam shots give us a real sense that this tiny 1950s Southwest town – the movie was mostly shot in Whitney, Texas, a town with a population of just over 2,000 – really exists.
The rhythm of The Vast of Night is a carefully choreographed series of counterpoints. When the camera does stop moving, it rests for a series of incredibly long takes – mirroring the editing style of movies and television shows from the 50s period – which builds suspense and adds a hypnotic quality in a few scenes. Then Patterson mixes it up again with a series of quick cuts as the action picks up. Cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz gives the whole film a rich, saturated color palette that evokes nostalgia for an era quickly fading from living memory.
Patterson and Sanger’s screenplay works hard to evoke the sense of wonder that came with the early days of the space race. In one long tracking shot that follows them from far away, Fay tells Everett about a science and technology magazine story she read predicting what the future – meaning the 1970s through the year 2000 – would look like. She talks about giant vacuum tubes that will transport people from coast to coast in a matter of a few hours and phone numbers assigned at birth. Since everyone will carry a personal phone with them at all times, the article says, if someone doesn’t answer, that’s how you’ll know that they’re dead.
The breathlessness with which Fay relates these wonders of the future to Everett are part of the movie’s charm. It seems impossible – which might actually be the case, since nostalgia evokes something that never really existed in the first place – that this sort of guileless naiveté was ever possible.
Patterson carefully and expertly punctures the myth of this vision of unquestioning white, middle-class 1950s optimism in one key scene. The first person to call into Everett’s radio show with a possible explanation for the strange sounds coming over the telephone lines is a man named Billy. He says he heard the exact same sounds years earlier when he was in the military.
He and a number of other soldiers were ordered to a site in the desert – he can’t say where, because the windows on the planes and buses that took them there were all blacked out – where they built an underground bunker to house a strange type of aircraft. Billy is a black man, and he says that all the men on this mission (and other missions like it) were either black or Mexican because the men in charge knew the soldiers wouldn’t be believed if they talked about what they saw. Actor Bruce Davis plays Billy, and we only ever hear his voice on the phone, but the way he tells Billy’s story is mesmerizing.
The same is true for actor Gail Cronauer, who plays an old shut-in named Mabel Blanche. Mabel tells Everett and Fay she also has answers about the strange sounds. Her tale leads the two fledgling investigators – who couldn’t help but put me in mind of Mulder and Scully from the sci-fi TV show The X-Files – to the movie’s mysterious and wondrous climax. Cronauer’s discomfiting delivery of Mabel’s story about the weird transmissions and how they affect people is chilling.
The Vast of Night’s spooky mood and mystery plot transcend the film’s tiny budget and limited resources. If Andrew Patterson can evoke something as grand as Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind for under a million bucks, I pray to the movie gods that someone gives him a giant Hollywood budget. We need to see what wonders he might conjure with it.
Why it got 4 stars:
- The Vast of Night establishes such a great, spooky atmosphere from the very first frame. It tells an engrossing story, with some excellent (and in a few cases, unsettling) performances. It’s a fun time “at the movies” all around.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- In the scene where Fay is reading the article about future technology to Everett, she stops and finds a specific passage because, she says, “I want to read it to you, so it has the same effect on you.” That basically sums up my entire personality. Fay is a woman after my own heart.
- This is one of those movies I watched with my Bluetooth headphones connected to the TV, and it really paid off for me. The sound design is meticulous and helps the rich atmosphere, and it really adds something when the soundtrack and dialog are right there in your ears.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The Vast of Night is available as part of an Amazon Prime subscription. Amazon has also rolled it out to a series of drive-in theaters that are operating during the pandemic. This would be a phenomenal movie to see in that setting.