The Vast of Night review: An ominous, atmospheric build toward nothing

The Vast of Night stands as an impressive debut from director Andrew Patterson in terms of aesthetics, but the slow-burn story leaves much to be desired.

Admittedly, The Vast of Night could not have come out at a better time. With movie theaters shuttered and big studio releases on VOD far and few between, we’ve got much more time to explore smaller, independently made films, such as Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night, a moody science-fiction thriller picked up by Amazon Prime Video.

The film is told as an episode of a fictional Twilight Zone-esque TV show and follows a night in the life of switchboard operator Fay and radio DJ Everett, both of whom have their small-town 1950s lives shaken up when Fay picks up a mysterious noise coming over the switchboard. (Spoiler alert: It’s aliens.) Over the course of an hour and a half, we follow Fay and Everett in their search for answers, and although the film has just about all elements going for it to be right up our alley, we can’t help but feel disappointed by the end result.

There is no doubt that The Vast of Night is an impressive first entry for Andrew Patterson, and an absolute success in terms of aesthetics and tone. The small budget works to the film’s advantage in that Patterson has to be clever and efficient with his use of cinemaphotography, which he most definitely is.

The immediate takeaway after viewing is the film’s singular tone. The camerawork is impressive and consists of several long tracking shots throughout the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico, which are accompanied by a spectacular score that makes even the most uneventful of shots feel urgent and intriguing. One long take, in particular, the scene of Fay working her magic at the switchboard, is the film’s crown jewel, and a testament to both Patterson’s vision as a director and actress Sierra McCormick’s (who we know as Olive on the Disney Channel series A.N.T. Farm) ability to keep nine straight minutes of one-sided dialogue interesting.

The film is full of bright spots like these. The Vast of Night is remarkably dialogue-heavy, and although sometimes the fast-paced, lingo-ladden chatter can be a little difficult to understand beneath all the southern accents, the sheer amount of lines spoken, combined with the average length of shots being far longer than standard Hollywood fare combines to create a sense of understanding and oneness with the people of Cayuga.

It’s impossibly easy to buy into the film’s premise, and within minutes we were already wholly invested and ready to believe whatever Patterson was going to tell us. The tragedy, then, is that Patterson has relatively little to say. Once the ball got rolling and Fay and Everett began tracking the mysterious sound, we began to wonder where things would eventually twist, because the obvious, predictable answer was aliens.

Maybe it’s our fault for hoping that The Vast of Night would follow in the footsteps of a film like The VVitch, in that it’s a slow burn with a shock ending, but The Vast of Night has all of the build-up and none of the pay-off. The ending, as we previously mentioned, is one that anyone could predict a mile away, and while that might not be a bad thing if the journey getting there was an engaging one, the film is void of character growth and conflict.

Other than minute bickering, Fay and Everett are never tested and never turn against each other.  They’re a wholly united front who have the exact same amount of knowledge about what’s going on as the audience does, and neither of them grows or learning anything over the entirety of the film.

For a film with such a low budget and a bare-bones premise, we were hoping that the characters would be Patterson’s bread and butter — that Fay and Everett would help truly sell us on The Vast of Night‘s predictable premise, but they do nothing of the sort.

Unfortunately, the film is all beautiful shots and stunning sound design but none of the magnetic character or intriguing story. The Vast of Night evokes so little emotion other than expectancy that we can’t call it a success other than in terms of aesthetics, which is a shame, because Patterson is clearly an ambitious and capable talent.

Have you seen The Vast of Night? What’s your favorite science-fiction film? Sound off in the comments below.