'The Vast of Night' Review: Amazon Prime movie is a redefining sci-fi shoutout to age-old classics
Spoilers ahead
Andrew Patterson is bound to be a new addition in the directorial Hall of Fame somewhere down the line if his debut feature film is anything to go by. 'The Vast of Night' is a groundbreaking featurette powered by incredible creativity and charm that aptly portrays a time and an unconfirmed scientific theory in one place.
Set in the 1950s, the plot of the film pans in on the small town of Cayuga in New Mexico, and if you have your facts straight you know they did a spot-on job with the on-screen location. New Mexico has headlined every major media outlet in the past century for its notorious paranormal sightings. We are introduced to Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick) and Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) at the Cayuga High-School basketball game, as the former seeks the latter out to help her with her new tape recorder.
Fay is a switchboard operator in town who works nights, while Everett is a radio presenter on the local radio. However, that fateful night the duo encounters a strange radio frequency over their respective radio operative devices and team up to get to the bottom of the strange occurrence.
What ensues is an investigation piqued by innocent curiosity and a slew of surprising discoveries. The film is, in all sense, a sci-fi thriller employing the basis of a possible alien invasion but not delving entirely into the 'alien' aspect of it. It is simply an enthralling journey of two teenagers whose only goal is to quench their thirst for answers behind the strange garbled interference in their radio equipment. The events transpiring in the film are an account of a single night.
The film is hugely reminiscent of the golden era — rotary dial phones, clear tapes that required manual installation, switchboards for telephonic communication, and a time when literally everyone, even 17-year-old kids, could smoke without any qualms. It is a nostalgic piece of art, with a gorgeous retro feel, complete with the vintage cars and style of clothing.
The film invokes an epoch and creative ingenuity from those classics as 'The Twilight Zone', 'The Day the Earth Stood Still', 'Invaders from Mars' and the like. To some extent, it felt like Patterson incorporated a very Hitchcockian method of story-telling from the somber '50s background score (courtesy, Erick Alexander, and Jared Bulmer) playing upon our senses as the suspense continues to build to an all-time high.
A scene that instantly grabs our attention and also increasingly appeals to the aesthetics of film-making is the proficient use of the Steadicam by MI Littin-Menz, spanning from where Fay is, behind her switchboard, to Everett, who is at his radio station a mile or so away. There's something about the continuous long-shot that glides around town penetrating through doors and windows, only adding a certain depth to the events unfolding in the film. Another noteworthy scene is Patterson's 10-minute dedication to Fay, as she rummages through the switchboard post the strange interfering radio signals as her unease and anxiety over the unknown spikes up.
Everett, while portrayed in all his confident glory, is also visibly perturbed by Fay's discovery. He instantly broadcasts the distorted sound recordings onto his radio program hoping someone out there has some answers and he's proven right.
Throughout the segment and after, the visuals fluctuate to a dark screen as Billy (Bruce Davis), a disabled African-American veteran spills secrets over a phone call from when he was part of a confidential military operation, years prior to the Sputnik landing. He had no knowledge of what he was getting into, however, it had everything to do with "something in the sky." In turn, the operation unmasked the blatant racism and sexism in the military which would also serve as feasible grounds for denial if the confidential information were leaked.
But the mysterious interfering garbled audio transmissions are not exactly unfamiliar. They date back to farther than anyone ever imagined, a senior woman named Mabel Blanche (Gaile Cronauer) calls in to inform the curious kids. Both McCormick and Horowitz's performances are laudable in the film who aptly portray the adventurous teenagers that will stop at nothing to seek answers to the strange phenomenon.
Their chemistry is palpable and also presents the feel of a rom-com, but set in a thrilling sci-fi framework. 'The Vast of Night' is a commendable and rather successful attempt at redefining classics in the genre and will greatly appeal to sci-fi lovers if they were to center it from an artistic point of view.
'Th Vast of Night' is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.