Mark Reviews Movies: THE VAST OF NIGHT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 28, 2020

They don't really make radio dramas anymore. The format mostly disappeared with the advent of television. Radio itself has moved from entertainment necessity, to the staple of any car ride, and finally to essential irrelevancy with the rise of portable media players and the abundance of podcasts. One gets the sense that the makers of The Vast of Night mourn the absence of and are nostalgic for the audio plays of old. They've basically made one with this film.

This is, of course, a bit of an exaggeration. The media of film and radio are vastly different and inherently incompatible. It's impossible for the latter to replicate the former, and it would be a complete waste of the most essential element of the former to even attempt to imitate the latter. We can stand a movie only providing us sound on a black screen for a certain amount of time, but if the filmmakers were to give us that for, say, about 85 minutes (the approximate length of this film without the credits), we'd probably want a refund. They call them motion pictures for a reason. There needs to be motion, and more to the point, there need to be pictures.

Director Andrew Patterson's debut film has both of those essential elements, but they're often downplayed here. The movements of a scene may be so minimal or so repetitive that we barely register them. A scene may be lit so dimly that we can hardly see the actors as they speak their lines. There are certain transitional moments when the screen does go black or mostly black, and we're just hearing people speak or the humming of the strange frequency that's the story's central MacGuffin.

All of these are intentional choices, not—in the case of those incredible dim scenes—errors or the telltale signs of shoddy craftsmanship. The point becomes clear quite quickly: The sound matters more to the filmmakers than the imagery. Given the film's framing (as an episode of a non-existent science-fiction TV show akin to "The Twilight Zone," with certain scenes playing out as if they're being watched on an old, black-and-white tube television) and the story's time period, that's how the feeling of nostalgia for the olden-day radio dramas emerges.

The story, provided by screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, is incredibly simple. In a small town in New Mexico, the local high school is preparing for a basketball game. On the scene is Everett (Jake Horowitz), a DJ at the town's radio station (another sign of the filmmakers' influences), called to the school's gymnasium for some technical assistance.

A squirrel bit into a powerline. Of all the nostalgic details within the film, the most amusing one, perhaps, is how so many people in the town either know about this specific incident or have their own story about some small animal electrocuting itself with a curious, fatal nibble. These are simpler times and a very uneventful place, filled with people whose stories Everett tires of in a matter of minutes or even a few seconds.

Excitement is brewing, or at least it is for Everett and Fay (Sierra McCormick), a young teen in the school band and whose mother works as the local telephone switchboard operator (another task and technology in which audio is the cornerstone). After Everett shows Fay how to work her new tape recorder (audiophiles, both of our protagonists), the girl gets to work taking over a shift on the switchboard for her mother.

Most of the town may be at the game or listening at home on the radio, but Fay gets a few confused or frantic calls. The power has gone out in house. Someone else is hearing a strange noise, and Fay herself is getting a weird, thumping frequency coming through the lines after a call is suddenly disconnected. Another person is convinced she has seen a large, round object hovering above a neighbor's barn.

Montague and Sanger's screenplay possesses very little happening in terms of action, and the fascinating thing is how Patterson uses that fact as the foundation for his stylistic ends. Take the scene—a one-take—of Fay working the switchboard, and note how, through the planting of the camera and McCormick's determined stillness, we're left to focus exclusively on the Fay's voice going and the callers' voices coming through the telephone lines. After Everett plays the strange signal on the radio, hoping someone can identify it, we get a pair of lengthy scenes featuring the DJ and Fay just listening to Billy (voiced by Bruce Davis), who has a hell of a story about the mysterious sound from his days in the military.

Earlier, in the school parking lot as Fay and Everett interview assorted game attendees, there's barely any artificial light, meaning the rat-a-tat dialogue of the teenagers and the stories of the interviewees are the main source of our attention. Another scene, as the plucky pair of investigators get closer to some answers, plays out in the darkness of the house of Mabel (Gail Cronauer), whose face is covered in shadow but whose voice comes through without any obscuring.

There is some non-dialogue-related action here (fast driving, an impressive shot that travels the streets and fields between Fay and the gym and the radio station, and the big, climactic revelation), but a viewer could close his or her eyes and still comprehend what's happening on screen. That was the appeal and power of the radio plays—that one needed to use imagination to see what the medium couldn't show. In its small and formally daring way, The Vast of Night tries to and, in unexpected ways, does bring back that sense of imagination to a medium that can show us just about anything.

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