Loneliness and alienation can be tremendously powerful feelings in the human psyche, often shaping who a person is. Stories like “I Am
Legend” draw upon the feeling of absolute isolation causing an essential change in someone’s character, taking us to some very dark and horrific places. Josh Lobo’s newest effort Night After Night is an intimate, deeply melancholic study in the slow relentless horror of losing connections to the rest of the world and the ensuing personal hell.
Andy has an existence that can politely be called humdrum. His days are spent as a security guard at a local university, his only real connection to the outside world a fellow guard named Willis who seems hellbent on getting Andy out of his shell, and his nights are spent avoiding his estranged wife and staring at the TV over Chinese. It’s the same thing day in and day out, something Andy seems oddly content with. And then Willis simply vanishes one day, with no explanation, and Andy begins to suspect that there may have been more to Willis’ insistence that something was going on that they weren’t supposed to know about at the university. Things only get stranger when Andy encounters an equally terrifying something in the basement that can seemingly look like any number of people.
Night After Night relies heavily not just on visual atmosphere, but also on atmosphere created by the characters. Scott Poythress as Andy does a lot using very little, bringing to life a character whose mundane existence is dignified yet quietly tragic. He’s the kind of guy you’d see eating alone at a restaurant and feel a pang of pity for. Poythress excels at making Andy sympathetic instead of merely pathetic, someone clearly comfortable being alone but with a quiet yearning for connection. His affection for Willis is apparent but his inability to really go out of his shell and open up to him is tragic, and the subtle shift to him coming off as even more lost paints the entire film with a drab, dreary feeling. Coupled with the absolute nightmare territory the film begins to slide into in the second act, the film becomes something surreal and unpredictable, a mundane but nonetheless nightmarish exercise in the human form as a source of horror. Not in a body horror sense, mind you; Lobo instead uses unorthodox lighting on nude figures of various body types covered in…goo to create something unsettling that I haven’t seen done in a film before. In a way, it’s more jarring than something that would be considered body horror because that genre warps the body, perverts it. In this film, Lobo just gives us a different way of seeing the body to instill a feeling of revulsion.
This film can come off at times as disjointed, and while this might be a turn off for some, I think it went a long way towards accomplishing what Lobo set out to do. The narrative style is non-linear and not always coherent or clear, but honestly it feels almost like a feature instead of a bug. It lends the film a disquieting dreamlike feel, Lynchian not in the quirky sense but that there’s something not quite right about what’s going on and that the disconnect from logic and reality are exactly what we’re supposed to be seeing.
Night After Night was an interesting film: part character study in the life of a man unsure of his place in the world desperate to find out what happened to one of his only connections to the rest of the world, part weird Jacob’s Ladder style “what the fuck” nightmare imagery and topped with just a dash of something like Brian de Palma’s Blow Out with the powers that be telling the little guy it’s all in his head. It’s not an easy watch; it will absolutely require your full attention to hook you before drawing you in on its own. But it’s a worthwhile watch and will evoke a whole spectrum of emotion in you if you give it a chance, even if all of them aren’t necessarily pleasant.
