I've known about Andrew Patterson's 2019 film "The Vast of Night" for some time before getting around to watching it for the first time yesterday (18/09/24) on Amazon Prime, prior to which it was a pay-per-view film after its initial streaming release - not that this aspect deterred me particularly but I wondered if it was worth the outlay despite it getting positive reviews.
The film turns out to be an interesting spin on the subject of UFO's that places the plot chronologically in the 1950's during a period noted for Cold War paranoia and well-before the current social media era where UFO's and the mythology that has grown up around the subject induces endless debate, crackpot theorising and inevitable fakery. Before social media it was very much a fringe interest, around the time I got interested in the subject and in the related subject of astronomy and the Space Race, in general. The film uses a clever framing device of a faux-episode of a "Twilight Zone" TV series episode screened on a vintage 1950's "Space Age:" style TV set, done very convincingly with an equally convincing Rod Serling-esque voice-over before segueing into the story itself, set in some Mid-Western suburban community in a town named "Cayuga" - a direct reference to the name of Serling's own production company - and entirely at night, and opening at a basketball game that has drawn the entire community to congregate in a sports hall for an evening during which the events depicted in the film gradually reveal themselves. The aim here seemed to be to suggest that this is a tall story but with a likelihood of being about events that actually happened and with a similar grain of truth that ran through some of Serling's work , and the writers apparently referenced two well-documented urban myths on the subject of UFO's and unexplained (but later explained) mysterious disappearances of people.
The two leads, played by Sierra McCormick in a career-defining performance as "Fay Crocker", a bespectacled teen-aged girl who takes over the town's phone switchboard when her mother goes to the basketball match, and Jake Horowitz as "Everett Sloane", a slightly older boy who is the smart, fast-talking DJ of Cayuga's local radio station, "WOTW" - there is no suggestion that they are romantically involved and McCormick's character is depicted as wise and well-read on science matters beyond her years.
Technically, the film is notable for several continuous take shots of a free ranging camera, either a drone or steadycam, as it follows the leads or as it races through a town comprising a typical 1950's Middle American "Main Street", grassy verges, and suburban vistas devoid of people that evoke the writing of Ray Bradbury, either to establish the topography of Cayuga and relative positions of Fay Crocker's home and the radio station that are pivotal to the story, or to follow Fay as she runs through the deserted town to inform Everett, following a strange radio signal that comes through the phone switchboard and when panicked callers talk about "something in the sky".
The creeping sense of paranoia is palpable, initially when Everett suspects that Russians may be involved and are using UFOs as a scare tactic, and later when he receives a call during a late-night phone-in at the radio station from someone who claims to know what the signal means. The caller spins a very convincing yarn about a secret military exercise he was drafted into along with several other rank and file soldiers who turn out to be either African American or Hispanic, in the belief by the military top-brass that no one will believe them if they tell anyone what the military exercise was about.
The caller reveals that a tape recording of the sound and other details was made by a resident of Cayuga and that it probably resides in the local library, to which Fay has a key, which in turn leads Everett and Crocker, like an early version of "Mulder & Scully", equipped with recording equipment, to the house of an elderly woman who claims to know more, which then tips the story even further into the realms of paranoid fringe theories popular in UFO sub-culture.
Despite what I felt to be a bit of a cop-out ending to the story the real joy of this film is Sierra McCormick's utterly convincing and absorbing performance as "Fay Crocker" and the films other "character" of Cayuga at night that reinforces the idea put forward in the film that UFO's tend to favour sparsely occupied places far from built-up areas, which adds immensely to the sense of unease as the townspeople suddenly begin to feel very vulnerable to some unknown force over which they have no control, and cosy 1950's Middle America is suddenly no longer cosy.
The film approaches the topic quite differently to other films, such as Spielberg's "CE3K" or "Independence Day" that only reference UFO mythologies that have accumulated over time to set stories in the present and to spin an epic big-screen story, and instead goes back to the immediate post-war period when many of these stories were just starting to enter the public consciousness against a backdrop of the Cold-War and nuclear paranoia.
"The Vast of Night", Dir: Andrew Patterson, 2019
Amazon Prime
19/09/24
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