NIGHT CALL - Mark Reviews Movies

Night Call, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 16, 2025

In Night Call, one bad night becomes exponentially worse for Mady (Jonathan Feltre), a locksmith working an overnight shift in Brussels. Writer/director Michiel Blanchart's film is in that classic vein of "wrong man" thrillers, which makes it easy to root for an unassuming guy who seems to become caught up in more than he can handle—only to repeatedly prove everyone wrong about him.

In this tale, Mady is just an ordinary young man trying to make a living while also studying for a degree. There's not much back story to him, and that's probably the way it should be. We're not here to get the character's history, after all, and Blanchart would rather show us the kind of person his protagonist is by giving him a series of difficult or seemingly impossible challenges to overcome.

The big, mostly unspoken one, perhaps, is that Mady is a young Black man, living in a city that appears as much a home to him as anyone else, but in the backdrop of Mady's adventures, there is also a significant protest happening. Another young Black man was beaten by the local police and has since died of his injuries, and while he might be participating in the protests if he could, Mady has his job, his education, and his future career about which to worry.

Whether or not Blanchart's story successfully threads these underlying matters of social injustice into the plot is certainly a discussion worth having. One could argue that the film takes too long to really raise those ideas within the narrative as anything more than, well, ideas. When it does happen, we might be more confounded and frustrated by what Blanchart has Mady do and why the filmmaker has him do it in order for the story to arrive there than anything else.

In a way, that's almost beside the point, though, because, just as with matters of logic, the film possesses such a propulsive momentum that it doesn't stop to let us question the success of its thematic intentions. No, this is just a ride.

It's a very good one, too, that sees Mady taking a call from a young woman named Claire (Natacha Krief), who says she has locked herself out of her apartment. He shows up, asks for payment, and also insists on seeing Claire's identification to prove that this is her home. Claire says the money and her ID are in the apartment, so he breaks the lock and waits. Eventually, the woman steps out with a garbage bag, says she has to take out the trash, and claims to be heading to an ATM to get his fee.

Obviously, this isn't her apartment, but by the time Mady realizes he has been duped, he gets another call from Claire. She tells him to get out immediately, before the actual owner returns. By then, it's too late.

To reveal the specifics of the resulting scene or, for that matter, the rest of the plot would be unfair. There are twists and turns galore here, starting with the real apartment owner, who has a swastika on full display in his place, and why he had a lot of money hidden in a punching bag until Claire absconded with the cash. Blanchart's particularly clever in establishing one set of complications and reasons to worry about Mady, such as the fact that the man returning home is a violent racist, only to upend some of those expectations and give us different, as well as more troubling, reasons for conern.

The actual antagonist here, for example, is a gangster named Yannick (Romain Duris, turning his significant charms to devious ends), who wants the money Claire stole. Assuming Mady was involved in taking the cash, Yannick proves he needs the money by taping the young man's mouth and nostrils shut. Eventually believing Mady's story of being conned, Yannick gives him the night to find the cash and bring it to the gangster. If Mady doesn't, Yannick will finish the job with the tape and go after anyone close to him that the criminal can find.

That's the basic setup, with some vital details excised, and the rest of the story has Mady trying to find Claire. Sometimes, it's with the aid of Yannick's goons, such as Theo (Jonas Bloquet), but mostly, the guy is on his own—and especially so after discovering that, while he can't trust Yannick, he definitely cannot trust anyone close to the gangster, either. The overarching plot here constantly reveals traitors, double-crosses, and, more surprisingly, moments that make us re-assess some of the supporting players, such as when Claire does return and when we catch a brief glimpse of Yannick outside of his criminal enterprise.

More to the point, though, Blanchart has assembled a reason for multiple scenes of action and tension—from chases through the city, to Mady trying to outwit or hide from the thugs pursuing him, to standoffs that literally put our protagonist in a corner. Each one requires the filmmaker to figure out clever ways to get the poor guy out of those tight spots.

There's a desperation to Night Call that extends beyond the mechanics of the plot and these scenes, because Mady is gradually but decidedly changed by his experiences as the night progresses. In one moment, a character points out that Mady's not the type to smash someone's face with a hammer, but after everything he has been through and could be going through in the future, he proves that person specifically right by proving them wrong in a more generalized way. The ending might not land in a sense of the bigger picture Blanchart is going for, but in terms of seeing this young man for who he really is in the midst of all of this, it succeeds.

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