The Vast of Night (2019. Amazon-produced)) is a cleverly written and imaginatively filmed flying saucer movie. The picture is jazzy riff on themes most famously developed in 1950's and early '60's Sci-fi shows, both on TV and in the theaters. In many of these films, a small town, isolated in the desert, finds itself besieged by alien invaders from the stars. The Vast of Night shares with these movies unknown actors, plucky teenage heros, and a conspicuously low-budget. These types of movies, and TV shows similar to them (for instance, The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits) are tinged with racial and political paranoia -- White people in a remote place are threatened by unearthly visitors. Vast of Night improvises variations on these themes, but is conceived as an art film -- that is, the schlocky material is presented in an elusive, non-dramatic style, an alienated approach to the subject that is filmed according the parameters of a European arthouse pictures; indeed, some of the sequences resemble Gaspar Noe's imagery that is intentionally occluded, poorly lit and difficult to watch due to illogical editing and inexpressive camera angles. The movie is very interesting, short (about 96 minutes) and worth watching for the ingenious variations that this ultra-low budget film devises as to its shop-worn subject matter.
In the tiny New Mexico town of Cayuga, everyone has gathered for qa night-time basketball game at the High School. There have been mysterious power outages (a squirrel has previously bit through a utilities cable). A disk jockey at the local radio station WOTW is tracked by the camera as he makes jive comments (he's ultra glib and hip for the era) and crawls around, briefly, under the school looking for the damaged wire. The disk jockey, named Everett, has a teenage side-kick who obviously adores him, Fay Crocker. Nothing much happens during the film's first fifteen minutes in which the camera simply follow the characters around, swiveling through grass and over parking lots in very low-angle tracking shots. The impression this sequence gives is that it was shot silently and that the dialogue was dubbed later -- although the concept of "dubbing" doesn't really apply since the shots are too remote from the characters (and the lighting mostly too dim) for us to see their faces. Fay works at a party-line switchboard and, in the next sequence, we see her fielding and transferring calls about lights in the sky and a strange humming and throbbing sound of static with remote thuds that, now, materializes on some of her phone lines. Fay calls Everett at the WOTW station and tells him about the phone calls. Everett broadcasts the weird static noise over the air, asking if any of his "five listeners" (everyone else is at the basketball game) can identify the noise. A man named Billy calls, obviously African-American, and an ex-service-man. He talks about secret government installations and buried flying saucers concealed by the government and identifies the strange sound as being associated with "people in the sky." A woman calls the station and says that she can identify the noise as well. But Fay and Everett have to leave their posts to interview her. The woman can't walk and seems to be half-mad. She talks about how her young son was kidnapped by aliens in a UFO, although she admits that most people thought that she killed the little boy -- she's a single unmarried mother who was deserted by her man. The woman babbles in an unknown tongue that she learned from her baby son who spoke in that way. She says that the aliens are hovering overhead and "with advanced broadcasting techniques" causing people to go mad and behave badly -- all human aggression, including wars, is based on their intervention in our affairs. The basketball game is now ending and there's concern that the aliens, whose flying saucers have been glimpsed in the night sky, will attack the townsfolk and kidnap them. Fay is concerned about a baby niece and goes to the house to collect the child. (Her motivation for this act is unclear, probably explained by some dialogue very early in the movie that I missed or didn't understand to be significant.) By this time, the aliens are very close. Everett and Fay, with the baby, Mady, venture into the dark woods -- a bad idea, I think. They see a little space ship hovering over the tree-line but, then, look up to see they are under the huge "mother ship" -- a dimly lit artifact with some bluish lights on its circular underside. The screen blacks out. There's a burst of music --the score is extra-terrestrial blue-grass. Then, a low tracking shot shows dust, footprints, and tape-recorder that Everett was carrying: Fay, Mady, and Everett have vanished.
There's not much to the movie but it is atmospherically directed. The film is conceived as two theatrical long-take monologues with a prelude of complex, if inexpressive tracking shots through the gymnasium and school and, then, across to the switchboard where Fay works. The monologues are each about eight to ten minutes long -- first Billy, whom we never see (he's just a voice on the telephone) talks about his adventures in the military and how Black and Mexican soldiers were callously exposed to toxins from outer space at the hidden UFO sites; second, the old woman's monologue about how her son was kidnapped by the space invaders lasts about ten minutes toward the end of the movie. The scene in which Fay operates the switchboard is one continuous take, probably close to fifteen minutes long and filmed from one angle -- this scene involves calls from townspeople, Billy's monologue, and calls to Everett about the weird sound on the telephone lines; it's a very daring, bravura, and experimental way to present this pivotal episode in the movie. Individual sequences are punctuated by blurry black-and-white footage that is purported to be TV kinetoscope film -- the intervening sequences revert to a postulated TV show called "The Paradox Zone", obviously a parody of The Twilight Zone complete with super hardboiled Rod Serling-like narration. Some scene are simply black screen with voices heard off-camera. (I would estimate that a tenth of the movie is black screen). Sometimes, the camera tours the little town but always moving at a baffling speed and skimming the night-time lawns and weeds at a height of about six inches off the ground. Scenes featuring montage are cut without any rhyme nor reason -- the shots don't match, eyelines go awry and the editing in these scene, consisting of close-ups of inanimate objects and shots of people's faces is completely disorienting. Everything is off-kilter and alienating. The photography is extremely wide-screen, but diffuse and murky as if blown up f from some sort of anamorphic 8 mm. The dialogue is ultra-literate, in fact, far too articulate for the rural setting -- Everett talks in hipster beatnik lingo (recordings are "baking biscuits"). He admits that he has never seen or spoken with a Black person. The two monologues are highly poetic, heightened in diction, and lyrical in tone -- there's a refined theatrical aspect to the movie. The space ships are convincing but they don't really move. Most films of this sort will feature hundreds of special effects technicians. The closing credits name two special effects men. The movie has nowhere to go, but, as a study in mood and style, it's extraordinary. I just wish there was more to the content. (The Vast of Night is the impressive debut of the Oklahoma auteur, Andrew Patterson -- I will be interested to see more films from this director.)
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