‘Night After Night’s’ Surreal Chills Deliver [Chattanooga Review]
Night After Night’s high-concept, Creepypasta-Esque synopsis is deceptive. Josh Lobo’s sophomore feature bears thematic and stylistic DNA with his debut, I Trapped the Devil (a great addition to your Christmas horror rotation), and it’s just as intentionally confounding and disorienting. The premise promises two security guards haunted by a mute specter. The figure returns every evening without explanation, hanging over the film’s mind-bending structure like a ghost you just can’t shake.
The conventional narrative, packed tightly within the more Satoshi Kon sensibilities, follows Andy (Scott Poythress) and Willis (Johnny Sibilly), two overnight guards at a private university whose personal lives intersect with a mute apparition that appears just after the sun goes down without fail. The oppression is obsessive, at times gruesome, and Lobo’s feature starts with a fractured grip on reality and only spirals from there.
Much like I Trapped the Devil (or even Recluse, the Tribeca hit Lobo produced), Night After Night is largely experimental, culling influence from anime, J-horror, The X-Files, and other sci-fi/horror benders for something approachable and familiar, yet still singular in evocation and execution. It’s a very strange movie, and it demands active attention as its sordid vibes wash over you. In a sense, it’s almost the antithesis of the passive horror cinema we get too often these days, the kind where you can play an entire gauntlet of Royal Match on your phone and still follow along (not that you should be doing that).
Alexis Louder stuns as the cryptic Janica, Bryce Holden’s cinematography dabbles in varied forms, adopting grainy security footage and infrared lensing to augment the unnerving atmosphere, and Simon Waskow’s score is suitably thrumming. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I’m not sure I entirely followed all of it.
The hypnotic scares and commitment to weird, weird vibes were singular and off-kilter enough to sustain interest, even as my understanding of not only what I was seeing but what it all meant started to wane. That’s not necessarily a knock against Lobo’s film. The eight years away from filmmaking after a stunner of a debut look good on him, and Night After Night’s Lynchian impulses meet Naoki Urasawa’s Monster feel is nothing short of immaculate. Title cards, Heaven’s Gate homages, and insidious narration punctuate Lobo’s elevated interest in probing deeper, rattling the soul alongside more visceral, tactile impulses.
At times, sure, it might reek of arbitrary horror. Some visual cues, including regular nudity, feel culled from the A24 school of stripping away a specter’s clothes just because. The symphonic glitches and narrative confusion are very 1990s experimental in a way that erodes the unique identity Night After Night mostly successfully cultivates.
Those are small grievances, however, and largely, Night After Night is a singular success. Its trippy sci-fi trappings and oscillating focus might disrupt some viewers and risk confusion, but even at its most confounding, it’s a promising follow-up from one of this generation’s most electric genre talents. Spend the night here – you won’t regret it.
Night After Night had its World Premiere at this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival
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Night After Night
Summary
Night After Night’s surreal, hypnotic horror might risk confusion, but Josh Lobo’s feature remains a heady trip worth taking.
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