FrightFest review – Night After Night
Director Josh Lobo – who also co-wrote this with Rowan Russell – made I Trapped the Devil, a FrightFest selection in 2019; he’s also an executive producer on this year’s Recluse. On the strength of two films, he’s demonstrated a particular style and mood – though Night After Night (not a reboot for Lindsay Shonteff’s Night After Night After Night) is vaguer as to its story premise than the earlier, Twilight Zone-inspired movie. It’s a mood piece stressing character and location, while being deliberately ambiguous about what exactly is going on in a private university where low-level employees joke that the place is more like a religious cult than an institute of learning.
The focus is on security guard Andy (Scott Poythress – a you-know-the-face actor), who seems not the sort of person you’d necessarily want carrying a loaded gun around students – he’s left his family for unstated reasons and moved into a one-room apartment with paper-thin walls, spends time at a shooting range honing skills, and has only a few desultory conversations with work buddy Willis (Johnny Sibilly) about arcana like whether television is better than movies. In his downtime, he hears a lot of sexual and perhaps violent activity from the room next door, then begins having enigmatic chats with the unseen woman (Trace Lysette) who lives there. When Willis is mysteriously off the job – the film loops back for a flashback to explain something about this, which involves odd silent naked people showing up in the building at night – Andy is persuaded by an administrator (Alexis Louder) to work the night shift. He too starts seeing the naked people, and wonders whether they are intruders, ghosts, zombies, part of a social experiment or his imagination … as other elements of his life go in and out of focus, thoroughly unsettling him (and the viewer). When he finally goes next door to meet the woman he’s been talking to, he doesn’t find what he expected – in one of the creepiest, subtlest moments in the film.
It may be that the narrative is just too opaque for its own good – the film runs on vibes and moods, which is all very well until the attention slides off and you find yourself just puzzled rather than taken on a scary trip. Familiar face A.J. Bowen shows up late in the day as a replacement guard who seems almost weirdly normal, which makes him out of place.
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