It’s been a while since I wrote a movie review and posted it on this blog. However since this is the time of riots in the streets and COVID-19 plus there’s no place to go, new movies seemed like a pretty safe subject.
Peter Travers, the movie reviewer for Rolling Stone magazine and the host of Popcorn on ABC TV, just presented a list of major motion pictures that were coming out this summer. And of course, most of them were not going to appear in movie theaters so the only place left for them to go were streaming services. And the very first one he mentioned was a very low budget film noir science fiction thriller that takes place in a little bitty town in New Mexico in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. This movie is called The Vast of Night and it is a wonderful movie by first time feature director, Andrew Patterson. You can find this movie on Amazon Prime since it was produced by Amazon Studios, and it’s truly worth the search.
Basic story is a small town in the 1950s and a couple of teenage science nerds uncover a strange sound on the phone lines and then on the radio air waves. They spend the entire movie trying to track it down only to find it comes from above. In the meantime, during their search they run into interesting characters and scary stories of previous alien visitations and people being taken like in Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Oh, so you’ve all heard this movie plot before, right? Well not exactly, because this is told in a fresh new super interesting way unlike any science fiction movie I have ever seen or heard.
Changing camera styles like people change their socks you go from intense closeups that last for minutes at a time to tracking shots that follow our heroes wandering through their small town. Sometimes the lighting is moody and dark, other times it is bright and cheerful filled with color. How the director Andrew Patterson got this much movie from what is obviously a very limited budget is a work of genius.
Patterson also allows his actors a lot of room to do their work and in the process gets some amazing performances. Especially an about 10 minutes sequence with no cuts where Sierra McComick from Supernatural, who plays the female lead Fay, sits at an old manual phone switchboard for a small town and connects the different people who call. Yet during this sequence the first hint of what is to come appear through the phone lines and you watch Fay’s growing concern as to is happening. She handles multiple calls and each one is different but also you see her increasing puzzlement and fascination as the mystery begins to unfold. Her performance by such a young actress is astonishing.
However, this not even the most outstanding performance in the movie. That belongs to Gail Cronauer as Mabel. Ms. Cronauer delivers a long, extended monologue that in lesser hands would have bored the short attention span of today’s audiences, but she is riveting. Even more amazing is there are no cutaways during her long scene as she is filmed from only one side of her face, yet she holds the screen totally.
Another shout out as well to Cinematographer M.I.Littin- Menz and his film/light crew for some really inventive shooting. There is one extended tracking sequence where the camera goes through the entire town including inside a high school basketball game which most of the small-town citizens are attending that I am not really sure how they accomplished it. At first, I thought is was a drone shot then a steady cam then…. However, they did it – it is a great sequence and the editing by Junius Tully is flawless.
My only complement is it starts extremely slow. It is about 20 minutes before we get to anything that resembles a plot point. And that is the point because Patterson and his screenwriters James Montague and Craig W Sanger are purposely distancing you from the material. This is a movie where you have to come to it, it’s not going to come to you. Patterson is also making you pay attention to the small details that will become very important later on in the movie. Boring small town existence in the middle of nowhere, the 1950 switch board telephone system and reel to reel tape recorders which seem incredibly innocuous at first but later become very important as the movie progresses. But if you’re looking for a movie to jump at you from the 1st frame this is not the movie for you. This one takes some patience, but it’s worth it.
This movie season is going to be very different and most of it will be in your home or a drive-in. The is the first highly recommended movie of the summer and you should try to find in on Amazon Prime.
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