Coastal View News
The aim of this review, and the aim of that which the
review is about, is escape (which
feels nice right now, even if only for an evening). Escape to something a
little less real. Escape to something strange, eerie, distant, yet also warm,
inviting, and nostalgic.
“The Vast of Night” is a great escape. Think “The
Twilight Zone”. Think “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Think “The War of
the Worlds”. “The Vast of Night”, which was on limited release last year and is
just now streaming on Amazon Prime, is a low-budget sci-fi mystery that takes
place in New Mexico in the 1950s.
The movie begins with a Twilight-Zone-esque opening—“The
Paradox Theatre Hour”—on a crackling old TV. Which sets the stage for a kind of
retro otherworldliness—a dead serious but seriously heartwarming sense of
mystery and wonder and a little fear and scandal and apprehension. Other scenes
throughout the movie also appear on this crackly ‘50s TV set with poor
reception, reminding us how to feel, what mood to be in, but also that this story
is strange, distant, manipulated, mediated, fabricated, not totally real.
The story follows high schoolers Fay Crocker (Sierra
McCormick) and Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz). Crocker is a switchboard
operator. Sloan hosts a local radio show. They, like everyone else in this
movie, like to tell tales to each other—some long, some short, always speculative,
and, if possible, recorded.
On the night of “the disturbance” almost the whole town
is at a local basketball game. Even the game, which must have been the height
of commonplace for the townsfolk, has an eerie aura to it. It plays out in this
big, old hanger, the overhead lights give off an orange florescent glow, and the
dust particles wafting through the air figure as a kind of ether that holds the
big multi-personal hoard together like the teeming vesicles of an alien species.
On the outside, at their respective headsets, Crocker and
Sloan hear some strange noise over the radio. It’s some kind of interference.
At her switchboard, Crocker gets some unusual calls—maybe disturbing, maybe
not. Then Sloan gets a curious call into his radio show. The caller is older,
and tells of a time when he was with the U.S. military, and they brought him
out into the middle of nowhere to something super secret that they weren’t
allowed to say anything about. He doesn’t have all the details, though he notes
that he and his fellow military-grade peons felt strange, noxious side effects
from their encounter those many years ago.
Sloan’s caller is talking now, he says, first because he
is old and has nothing to lose, and, second, because the sound Sloan played for
him over the radio—that strange noise he and Crocker heard earlier—is exactly
the sound he heard while on his mysterious mission decades ago.
All of this is eerie, alien. Yet the plot is nothing new.
“There’s something in the sky” is the line. And all of the stylistic elements of
this old-school sci-fi drama are utterly genre-affirming. Even the upbeat ‘50s
style is unrepentantly old fashioned.
And yet “The Vast of Night” is fresh, exciting,
captivating. You already know what it’s
about, yet you can’t look away. The feel
of this movie—with the warm colors, town-traversing tracking shots, period
lingo, eerie score, and subtle distancing techniques—is so rich, atmospheric, quirky,
and yet somehow also quaint and reassuring.
We’re so used to being bludgeoned with hyper realism. We’re
primed to scoff at anything—sci-fi or not—that doesn’t look exactly like what
we’d expect it to if it plopped down into one of our backyards right now. But
what “The Vast of Night” insists, and what it reminds us was so wonderfully
effective about old TV shows and movies like “The Twilight Zone” and “Close
Encounters of the Third Kind”, is that not everything turns out exactly like we’d
expect. Some events, whether supernatural or extraterrestrial or just
unfamiliar, are, or would be, alien, confusing, weird, otherworldly, and maybe also
a little bit magical.
“The Vast of Night” is a transportation device—part time
machine, part alien spacecraft. And I’ll take this ride anytime.
