‘The Vast of Night': The Most Overpraised Movie of 2020 [Review]

Writer/director Andrew Patterson premiered “The Vast of Night” at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival in January 2019. Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights to the film not too long after its TIFF screening and, finally, released it on May 29, 2020, at drive-in theaters in the United States and via video-on-demand on Prime Video. Although the budget hasn’t been divulged, some reports have the total production cost of under $500,000. Suffice to say, this is a major industry success story.

There is so much energy, enthusiasm, and a clearcut love for its decades-old influences that many have been willing to lower their standards and reward “The Vast of Night” with praise. I will not be one of those people. There are good ideas here and I believe Patterson could make great films in the near future, he shows an indelible feel for framing and staging throughout, but, despite all the amassed talent in the world, no movie will ever work if there isn’t an interesting story to be told..

The film's plot, said to be loosely based on the Kecksburg UFO incident and Foss Lake Disappearances, is set in a remote, small American town on a Friday night, that’s where we meet confident wise-guy Everett (Jake Horowitz) who buzzes about the premises before settling down as a local, interactive DJ playing country tunes while fielding occasional calls from the resident light sleepers. Then, while on-air, and as reports swirl about mysterious lights in the sky, he picks up a strange unintelligible sound put through to him by his 16-year old switchboard operator friend Fay (Sierra McCormick). Where could this strange undiscerning noise be coming from?

Things get even weirder when an ex-soldier, who happens to be black, calls to tell of the time he and a group of fellow-black soldiers were sent out to investigate a similar occurrence. This sets the stage for the film’s socio-political themes, which aren’t laid on too thickly, but also has a stretched-out logic which I will not point out here because it would ruin the film’s consequent surprises. Later, an old lady calls in to the show, offering Everett a scoop on the same subject, which sends Fay and himself racing to her spooky house, with their bulky reel-to-reel tape recording equipment in tow, trying to uncover the boundless mysteries of the night at hand.

This quirky, offbeat love letter to 1950s sci-fi meanders along at a sluggish pace. The first 20 minutes of the film is literally a walk from a school arena to a radio transition station. However, although Patterson tries to hide his cards for as long as he can, boredom does set in, the only thing keeping us glued being Miguel Ioann Littin Menz’s lush cinematography and Patterson’s ambitious directing, which includes plenty of static camera set-ups, long takes and widescreen shots.

A lot of effort was put into establishing time, place, and atmosphere, but the vaguely-told story gets lost in the process. For all the showiness Patterson tries to splatter in his frames, he even copies the opening of Orson Welles’ “F For Fake,” you feel coldly distant to those frames, the characters always at a reach, but never fully developed for your own liking. The long-winded monologues and there are at least three here, showcase a writer too in love with his own words, and too pretentious to win his audience over.