The Vast of Night

The movie opens with a The Twilight Zone inspired opening on an antique style television setting up the tone for this movie, think Mysteries in History from Men in Black 2, a fictional show about alien events or was it real. Set in the late 1950’s in a small Nevada town seemingly in the middle of nowhere it is game night at the high school gym and the whole town is going to watch some basketball save for a few residents here and there. One of them a switch board operator the other the town’s radio host, when an unusual noise comes through the radio and odd calls start lighting up the switchboard with reports of something happening in the sky. The two listen to a caller and a town recluse that spin stories that may elude to something other worldly that may be happening in the skies above the town and that has happened before. Five minutes into the movie and I was hooked, from the tracking shots to the dialogue that unfurls between the towns people, the setup for this gives it a feel of a small town that could have existed back then. It captures that time period amazingly and the score elevates the visuals with this eerie, sci-fi feel that also has that feel of an old television show. While so much happens off screen, through telephone calls, the dialogue and the story being told just made it all the more intriguing. There are some issues with lighting at times being very dark, given this was filmed in just seventeen days with an extremely limited budget there has to be a little give here and there, the choice of how conversations are shot to the tracking shots make up for the lighting problems in my book. There are no distracting big name stars in this, the genuine performances of Sierra McCormick and Justin Horowitz captivates. If you’re a fan of The Twilight Zone or Stranger Things with that retro science-fiction aesthetic I think your going to enjoy this quite a bit. Regardless for what a first time director / filmmaker (Andrew Patteson) was able to accomplish is worth watching on Amazon. The best part being this one of the movie that actually works on a home VOD format being presented in the way it is as the old television show. A.