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| Image courtesy of Amazon. |
Set in the center of UFO sightings - a small town in New Mexico circa late 1950s - the picture does a great job of creating a sense of community in the fictional town of Cayuga, although the picture is primarily a two-person show with two fantastic supporting roles that exist to move the film's brisk story forward.
The film opens with a high school basketball game about to start - the fans are in the stands or eating food in their cars before the game and the players are warming up. Inside the stadium, a local radio disc jockey named Everett (Jake Horowitz) is attempting to help out with a problem involving flickering lights. A mixup involving his name provides one of the film's heartier chuckles.
As he's about to leave to head back to the radio station where he hosts "Highway Hits," an evening broadcast with a self-described audience of five, he's accompanied by Fay (Sierra McCormick), who operates the town's switchboard. Fay is a science junkie, and she regales him with predictions for the future that she's read about in various magazines. He shows her how to use a piece of recording equipment to carry out interviews.
For the first 15 minutes or so of the film, their conversation is held in a long shot as they walk through the dark streets of their small town toward their respective places of work. The effect is aimed at slightly distancing us from the characters - another such effect is portraying the entire movie as an episode of a "Twilight Zone" type of television show that kicks off in black and white through a TV screen.
But we soon get better glimpses of the characters, especially Fay, during a terrific 10-minute close up of her operating the town's switchboard and dealing with various people on the line. During this sequence, she notices a strange noise interrupting Everett's radio show at a station known as WOTW (could that possibly stand for "War of the Worlds"?). She calls him, and the two begin playing detective.
After playing the noise over the airwaves, they get the first of two calls that will set the course for the rest of the story. A man named Billy calls to tell them a story about how he once worked on a top secret project in the desert years before when he was in the military. In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Billy says that the military felt safe with him knowing about the project because - since he's black - no one would believe him if he spilled the beans.
The second call to the station is from an elderly woman with a creepy story to tell - and a visit to her house is among the picture's more unnerving scenes. For a sci-fi movie about a possible alien invasion, I found it fascinating that two of the best set pieces in the picture involved long stretches of conversation - one in which the screen occasionally fades to black for periods of time - rather than special effects (although there are a few of those too near the end).
The film's piece de resistance is an incredible tracking shot that begins at Fay's switchboard office, travels through the streets of the town, a field, a parking lot, through the stadium where the basketball game is being played, out the window, back out onto the road and winds up at WOTW. The sequence is an amazing visual representation of how information can spread across a town, and it's impressive that such a shot could be pulled off successfully in a debut film.
"The Vast of Night" isn't just one of the best science fiction thrillers I've seen in a while, it's one of the best movies I've seen this year so far, period. Its two leads are both very good and do a convincing job of carrying off the snappy, 1950s lingo, all the while making their characters sympathetic and a pleasure to be around. The film is also suspenseful and Patterson has learned a great lesson from the best examples of the genre - that withholding can often make a good story into a great movie. It's what we don't see in "The Vast of Night" that makes it even more compelling. This is an impressive and very enjoyable first feature.
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