Stream Gems: The Vast of Night
There’s isolated, and then there’s working at a radio station in a small town in the middle of the New Mexico desert in the 1950s while the entire rest of the town is at the high school gymnasium.
People consume movies in different ways. I’ve known people who compulsively have TV shows or movies on as background static in their waking and sleeping lives, and the camera choice and editing don’t even matter, because they basically consume the movie via sound. I know people who are content to watch 40 minutes of a movie on TBS, and they have no issue with commercials breaks or that necessary scenes were removed for time constraints. My wife doesn’t like watching a movie a second time, as she feels that there is no point if she already knows how the story turns out. I’m one of those people who tuns off the lights, shuts the curtains, cranks the sound way up, and watches a movie like one would watch a movie at the theater. When I have to answer a question or someone wants to chat, I pause the movie because I don’t want to miss any of it. (Yes, I know that I’m a madman.)
We can all consume movies in these drastically different ways because humans have two things going for them: we are very good at getting partial information and extrapolating the missing pieces, and we have been consuming narrative storytelling since before we could speak.
One of the reasons that I consider Mad Max: Fury Road to be a masterpiece is because George Miller and the rest of the production crew stripped all of the exposition out of the film, and let the movie show us things that we then fill in the bits around. (That many people consider the film to be simplistic suggests that they may expect a little more narrative hand-holding from their filmmakers.)
I think that The Vast of Night’s brisk run time and its ability to talk around its central plot point are signs of a well-written script. As viewers, we already know what is happening in the town because we have consumed variations of this story a thousand times before. It is a testament to the filmmakers that they take well-worn tropes and a VERY well-worn setting (1950s suburbia) and still make a film that feels vibrant and new.
The trope, is of course, isolated folk encountering the supernatural. We’ve encountered this so many times in our lives, one could make up a compelling variation on the spot (here goes: “I was driving through the Monongahela National Forest around sunset, when all of the sudden I heard this strange sound come from the woods and then saw a shadowy figure by the roadside. It lifted its arm and pointed at me, then started to speak.”). These tropes appear in folklore and religious texts in addition to fiction: Moses encountering the burning bush; Fox Mulder and Dana Scully bearing witness to a monster among the redwoods; a traveler seeing the devil at a crossroads at midnight. Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1958) codified these tropes, and Joseph Campbell expanded on them (The Masks of God, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1968; The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949), but even if you’ve never read these works, you know the idea because it is across all human culture and experience.
The Vast of Night wastes no time in explaining, and is the better movie for it. There is a Twilight Zone framing device around the movie, which I could have done without, but otherwise, just seeing CAYUGA: POPULATION 496 and NEW MEXICO, 1950 at the beginning was sufficient to fill in a lot of blanks and set expectation. We know we are getting a small town just off the highway in a setting with postwar fears and postwar plenty. And we know what tends to happen to characters in these kinds of stories.
So it is a genuine delight to see how the movie handles this over the course of its 89-minute runtime. Since we know what awaits the townsfolk without Basil Exposition coming in to tell us, we get to meet our characters and live in their world. Fay (Sierra McCormick) is a teenager who loves science and the 1950s ideas of the future (driverless cars, pneumatic tube transportation) and has found one of the few jobs in town which embraces new technology: she runs the telephone switchboard at night. Everett (Jake Horowitz) is a disc jockey at WTOT, also on the night shift, and he beams out his good vibes to folks traveling on the highway (as he says a few times in the film, “for the five of you listening out there”). I like how we get the aesthetic of a 1950s radio station without using any copyrighted or overused music. There are no needle drops like in Back to the Future or Goodfellas. The closest we get is the station offering as a prize “carpet taken directly from Elvis’ house in Memphis.” It is almost certainly a budgetary decision to do so, but I love how this makes the film feel different than other 1950s nostalgia.
There are many other folks in town, and they are all at the season opener high school basketball game against their “cross-valley” rival. We get a lot of names in the long tracking shot as Everett and Fay walk through the gymnasium, but it is good world-building: you know everyone’s name in a small town. The town feels lived-in and real with all of these little details, and I love it. I didn’t like the character of Everett in this first long walk-and-talk scene, as it felt like the screenplay was trying too much to make him seem like the cool guy, but I liked him more as the film progressed and it became obvious that he puts on his DJ persona around people. Fay is great from the jump, but most especially in the long build-up scene once she is at work at the switchboard and Everett is at the radio station.
A strange sound messes with the switchboard, and we get a lot of the inertia here that will take us through to the end of the movie. The switchboard scene is great way to balance dialogue and plot while keeping the scene restricted to a single person in a stationary location. Fay first calls the daytime switchboard operator for advice, but she soon realizes that everyone is at the ball game, so the town is basically empty except for her and Everett. So via phone, the two discuss the oddity, and events play out from there, especially once a caller mentions some work he did for the Army a few years back during which he heard the same creepy sound.
Before long, they are trying to unravel what the sound means, and are zipping all over town in a stolen car. It is obvious that they don’t know what is going on. But this is some excitement in this small town, so it’s worth getting in trouble just for the joy of it. However, as viewers we get the unease and tension sitting just under the surface.
I won’t spoil the ending, but near the end, we get a pretty stock character in this type of story (she’d be a seer or a witch or a madman for you folklore types), and she provides us with information about the sound, displays a lack of something (her missing son), and makes a request of the heroes. As soon as we see how the heroes respond to this request, we know how this all ends.
Andrew Patterson (director) and M. I. Littin-Menz (cinematographer) have made a deeply atmospheric and beautifully shot UFO suspense film, and I look forward to their next projects. I think that The Vast of Night is a worthy entry in the large canon of alien scare movies dating to the middle of last century. The use of telephones to both keep characters isolated but allow them to communicate really heightens the suspense, the long takes and tracking shots never feel gratuitous, and the ending, though expected, is quite satisfying.
I was really left with just one question: just what did that band member do that caused Everett to take his trombone?
Stream Gems is a feature where we highlight a film streaming on one of the big streaming services. No particular method to the selection, but the featured films are a) worth a watch and b) at or under two hours.
The Vast of Night is an an Amazon Studios film, released on Amazon Prime Streaming on May 29, 2020.
One Reply to “The Vast of Night”
Comments are closed.