Mark Reviews Movies: THE OVERNIGHT (2022)

The Overnight, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

There's a fairly neat idea at the core of The Overnight, although there's a distinct possibility that there actually isn't one. That's to mean, not only that is there not a clever concept driving this story, but also there might not be a driving conceit at all.

Mel Hagopian's screenplay is a concoction of vague ideas and references to similar fare, with its haunted hotel setting leading a couple kids to tell the protagonist to come play with them, for example. The kids, by the way, are ghosts—or maybe they're alive at that moment, soon to die yet again in a bloody way. Who knows? The movie is such a mess of intentional mystery and unintentional obfuscation that the point almost seems to be make us constantly think of the film it repeatedly copies. It won't be mentioned here specifically, of course, lest someone decide to deceptively pull a quote for the marketing. That would be appropriate, at least, since this is a shining example of bad deception.

The story involves David (Zebedee Row), an architect, and Jessie (Brittany Clark), a professional blogger (Actually, she might make videos, although one wonders why she exclusively takes pictures if that's the case), who are on their way to a romantic getaway. Making a stop at an antique shop in a small town, Jessie is confronted by a creepy and handsy fan (played by Justin L. Wilson), and David is fascinated by a creepy doll.

None of this is important, except that the doll ends up in the middle of the road, leading to a flat tire—that conveniently seems to affect their ability to drive only after they arrive at the hotel where most of the story takes place. Also, it's intriguing to note how unconvincing this relationship comes across through the jarringly inconsistent dialogue. At one moment, David is quietly fuming about Jessie's obsession with her phone, and the next, they're happily playing a game of "I Spy," as if none of the simmering tension that's established here matters. That the tension does matter again—such as when Jessie thinks her boyfriend locked her in the bathroom—only to be dismissed immediately—when she lures him into the shower she was just finished with—is only the start of the confounding, uncertain terms of this story.

Again, most of this takes place in an old hotel in another small town, where manager Salim (Rajeev Varma) informs the couple that a bad storm is approaching, only for David to look out the window of their room to notice that a bad storm is approaching, as if he wasn't just informed of that a few minute prior. That's enough of that, though, because this review will get nowhere if it keeps mentioning the little inconsistencies—although one should note how so many small ones can build to a large amount of frustration.

The background of this place involves a wealthy family, a series of looping deaths within the hotel, and maybe a deal with a demon, perhaps. If that sounds vague, it's all that we have to work with in this case. While Eugene (James Lorinz), the current representative of the rich family and owner of the hotel, may know, he's not talking—until, that is, a climactic ritual/showdown in the basement featured in the prologue, which definitely doesn't clarify matters. It involves Emma (Mathilde Dehaye), who's in the "care" of a cowboy-looking guy (played by Richard Millen), and how she puts an end to her own eternal cycle of death, or maybe it's David and Jessie's presence in the hotel on this particular night that gets the demon behind it all so angry.

The setup of the mystery has its moments, especially in the character of Salim, played by Varma with a harried and hurried desperation, who has to ensure that all of the soon-to-be-dead-again guests in the hotel are in the correct place and possess the right fatal instruments at a precise time. Even the intriguing idea of a constant loop of death and murder, though, is more or less dismissed (The irritated cook, played by Rhoda Messemer, is killed in the kitchen once, and there isn't a hint of who her murderer may be).

Hagopian attempts to set up a mythology and back story for the strange occurrences in the hotel. The fatal flaw of The Overnight is that neither the screenplay nor the directors, the team of Bobby Francavillo and Kevin Rhoades, bother to establish the foundational mechanics of what's even happening. Why should we care about why some supernatural nonsense is occurring when we're never certain what the nonsense is in the first place?

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