What’s up! I’m Marlon, and this is Ulven Reviews: movies and series from all over the world.
Today let’s talk about the 2019 Mystery Sci-Fi The Vast of Night, staring Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick and directed by Andrew Patterson.
One night in the 50s, in a small town in New Mexico, most people are at a High School basketball game.
Meanwhile, the Telephone switchboard operator, Fay (played by Sierra McCormick), and her friend Everett (played by Jake Horowitz), a Radio Disk Jockey, discover a mysterious audio frequency.
The two use the tools at their disposal to find out what the bizarre frequency is about.
Since in 2021, I opened the year with an awful movie, 2022 I decided to open with an excellent one: The Vast of Night.
The film is somewhat based on two real stories. You can watch this video, then the movie, and just after that, you can check the real stories in the link I’ll leave in the description box below.
Regardless, with not much to build upon, the filmmakers made an exceptional job at storytelling. It’s marvelous, it’s storytelling at its best.
Movie people like to say that phrase “show don’t tell”, this doesn’t apply here and is this lack of showing that makes us curious and interested, that’s what’s compelling about this movie.
But it wasn’t like that in the first 13 minutes or so. The camera accompanies Everett while he walks around the gymnasium talking with a lot of people. He walks fast, he talks fast, it’s very convoluted and confusing.
Then he and Fay start interviewing people in the cars, it’s just annoying.
It took only 13 minutes of this but I was already tired. I was almost thinking about giving up but I kept going, and it really paid off, because as soon as Everett starts to accompany Fay to her work things settled, the dialogues become awesome, and the real story starts to unfold.
And as soon as Fay sits her ass in that job things only got better and better. Things go slow, perfect for the suspense as things go increasingly more intriguing.
The pinnacle of the story for me, was when Billy, a former military (voiced by Bruce Davis), was giving an interview to Everett’s radio. It’s just billy’s voice through the radio and Everett’s face, paying close attention to everything he was saying, all the shady stuff going on when he was serving.
That took me back to the old days when I believed conspiracy theories, and I spent hours doing quote-unquote research. Now I know it was stupid to believe a bunch of nonsense, but, at the time, it was a thrilling sensation of uncovering these secret things. And it was that good sensation that the Billy scenes provided me.
The firm has more great moments, this one was just the number one for me.
The acting was another remarkable thing for me. Jake Horowitz does an awesome job, but my favorite has to be Sierra McCormick. She’s superb in the role.
I love the way she moves, the way she walks, but especially the way she talks. I wasn’t born in the 50s, even my grandma was only a child during the 50s. Yet, from what we see from movies, that’s exactly how I imagined someone from the 50s.
Especially an apparently shy young woman. Or at least the character seem shy-er around Everett. I think she had a little crush on him, I don’t recall if it’s ever mentioned, or if he’s just implicit, but this sensation remained in my brain.
The costumes are also great, and the little fictitious town of Cayuga is perfection.
And talking about the town, we have to address the amazing, mostly practical shots, traveling through the whole town. It gives us an awesome sense of scale, and also, we can see the whole place.
It’s marvelous filmmaking, and the movie got many more examples of outstanding filmmaking, from camera movements to long takes.
The score is not bad either. It’s very subtle, non-invasive, which was great for this movie.
The Vast of Night is really an excellent movie, and somewhat of a hidden gem because I never even heard of it before I saw it available on Amazon Prime Video. It took a little while to get going, but when it does, it’s just outstanding. I really love it, and I couldn’t recommend it further. I’ll give The Vast of Night 9 Moons!
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Thanks for watching see you in the next video.
Dos Ratos 