Its the first high school basketball game of the season and all of Cayuga, N.M., population 492, is cheering on the Statesmen at the gym. Except for the towns two brightest kids, Everett (Jake Horowitz) and Fay (Sierra McCormick), who are strolling through the empty darkness to their respective jobs as a radio DJ and switchboard operator, the two ways this Eisenhower-era small town keeps connected to the outside world. (Sixteen-year-old whiz kid Fay predicts electric roads and vacuum tube travel are totally going to happen by 1990; cellphones, however, she deems impossible.)
Tonight, however, Everett and Fay are going to become the conduits to creatures from even farther away – aliens hovering above the desert valley. But for this long, opening walk-and-talk in Andrew Pattersons startlingly confident micro-budget indie “The Vast of Night,” which won the audience award at this years Slamdance Film Festival and was scooped up by Amazon the night before its Toronto premiere, the first-time director is content to let his leads light up the shadows with their conversation about science and technology.
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For a while, he doesnt even film their faces, just the back-view as Everett chain-smokes and Fay races to keep up with him, ponytail swinging, and clutching her new tape recorder. The effect is, well, alienating. Who are these teens? And without seeing their lips, were missing a quarter of their fast-talking chatter. (Even in their reality, Fay mishears the ham radio call, “Breaker, Breaker!” as “Bacon, Bacon!”) Yet, Patterson trusts that chemistry will compensate for a gentle thriller that chooses to impress with ingenuity and charm instead of special effects.
“The Vast of Night” is all about execution. Its B-movie plot is so familiar that writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger unabashedly frame the story as an episode of a TV show called “Paradox Theater,” an on-the-nose “Twilight Zone” imitation thats the closest the film gets to nostalgia. Otherwise, “The Vast of Nights” young cast and crew view the 1950s without sentimentality. Theres no period jokes except for Everetts guess that the strange clicking thrum disrupting his radio show must be the Soviets, and his promise to give a piece of Elvis carpet to the first caller who can identify it.
Instead, the film (which Patterson funded by shooting game-time promos for his hometown NBA team, the OKC Thunder) has a lets-put-on-a show energy. (Even Jared Bulmer and Erick Alexanders score starts off as rustic handclaps with an occasional guitar strum before expanding into bold cello strokes.) The audience can sense the cast and crews verve to not just complete the picture, but pull it off with style. Once Miguel I. Littin-Menzs camera rests on the incredibly talented McCormick (“Some Kind of Hate”) at her switchboard, finally letting the audience soak in her horn-rimmed glasses and intelligent eyes, she launches into a 10-minute single-take scene where she takes calls, plugs in wires, gets connected and disconnected, and begins to suspect that something isnt right in sleepy Cayuga.
From there, “The Vast of Night” takes flight. AtOriginal Article
