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The Vast of Night
A film review
While a solid first outing for a director, The Vast of Night, from Andrew Patterson never seems to find its footing. It knows what it wants to do, but the elements chosen to accomplish this goal sort of contradict themselves and it all ends up feeling like a weird failure of a film experiment more than an arresting story as a whole.
Mostly, it's the way this movie is directed. Again, I get what they wanted to do here, and as a concept it is interesting. But a movie has to be engaging on a cinematic level. It's clear that this was meant to be a radio show type story set inside a visual form. It's a War of the Worlds type story blended with elements of Close Encounters, and the story is always TOLD to the viewer via dialogue, rather than SHOWN to the viewer. As such, even when the camera follows characters for long tracking shots, there's always dialogue and a story being told.
This idea of having characters move the story forward by telling it to us via actual stories set in their dialogue is unique, but it fails at a basic level. Even though for the most part the stories being told are captivating, it's hard to make it visually compelling when the director's idea for this is to just sit a static shot with the camera focused on someone sitting in a chair, or sitting at a phone operator board, or sitting in a radio broadcast booth. For ten…
