The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Zoned for twilight
‘Vast of Night’ — playing at select drive-ins before it streams — an enjoyable slice of retro sci-fi
First, strange music and blurry flickers of light. ¶ Then, as a room with outdated furniture comes into focus, a voice: “You are entering a realm between clandestine and forgotten, a slipstream caught between channels, the secret museum of mankind, the private library of shadows, all taking place on a stage forged from mystery and found only in a frequency caught between logic and myth. ¶ “You are entering Paradox Theater,” the unseen man continues as we are hit with some dramatic music and move increasingly closer to a retro-shaped television screen. “Tonight’s episode: ‘The Vast of Night.’”
So begins “The Vast of Night” a fun little gem of a flick highly influenced by and paying homage to “The Twilight Zone,” as well as some other sciencefiction works of another era. And while the movie will be available to stream May 29 on Amazon’s Prime Video service, it actually will play at select theaters May 15 and 16. How select? Well, very.
We’re talking about drive-in movie theaters, which like “The Vast of Night,” are themselves a reminder of another time. However, as many recent news stories have covered, drive-ins are experiencing an uptick in business because a family sheltering together at home also can pack into the car for a double feature. Mayfield Road Drive-In Theatre in Munson Township is among four Northeast Ohio establishments slated to host the movie, the other three being in Ravenna, Warren and Barberton. It was acquired by Amazon Studios after it debuted at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. The debut feature by director Andrew Patterson, “The Vast of Night” also received the top Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2019 Overlook Film Festival.
While Patterson shows his inexperience with a couple of distracting visual choices — such as having the screen go dark for a few seconds more than once to conjure the vibe of a radio play — this is a film that draws you in and keeps you invested as it tells a relatively short story in virtually real time. “The Vast of Night” is set in the late 1950s in a fictional tiny New Mexico town, Cayuga, on the night of a big basketball game at the high school. Before the game, we are introduced to reasonably charismatic radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz), who is showing kind-hearted switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) how to use the tape recorder she has purchased — and gently teasing her along the way. They walk around talking into the machine and interviewing a few folks enjoying pre-game dinners in their cars. As seemingly almost everyone else in town piles into the gym for the rivalry showdown, Everett goes off to host a show and Fay to connect phone calls. Fay soon encounters a strange, unfamiliar sound, both while listening to Everett’s show and through her headset. Everett is very interested in the sound that interrupted his communication to the very few people who would be listening to him at this particular time and, after Fay is able to play it for him, sets about to investigate it. After playing it on the show and talking to a man (Bruce Davis) with a military background who claims to have heard the sound years earlier, Everett and Fay take the investigation to the streets — the latter is all too willing to leave her one-person post at a moment’s notice — and begin to hear tales of something in the skies above Cayuga. They eventually visit a woman, Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), who believes she has an idea what is happening. As with the earlier scene when Everett interviews the man on the air, the conversation with Mabel is too much of an info dump. However, like the unseen Davis, Cronauer brings something fairly interesting to a minor role. Plus, McCormick and Horowitz make a solid pair of leads. She seems a bit more polished than does he, and her higherprofile credits — “Land of the Lost” and “Ramona and Beezus” among them — would tend to give that idea some weight. Regardless, it’s pleasant to spend time with them, both together and apart. So what is going on? Who’s responsible for this odd intrusion? Is it the Russians, as Everett comes to believe? Is it aliens? (That the radio station’s call letters are WOTW — one of the many fun Easter eggs from Patterson and writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger — would seem to hint at that.) The answer is satisfying enough, but the ending may leave some viewers hoping for something more. “The Vast of Night” may not quite reach the fantastical levels of being from “the secret museum of mankind, the private library of shadows” and all that. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to imagine watching it in the car with your loved ones under the dark of the evening.