A movie that promises way more than it can deliver: The Vast of Night

Andrew Patterson’s 2019 film, The Vast of Night (now on Prime), is a movie of high ambition and showcases some fine young talent but overall the film is a mess and a major disappointment. On the plus side: Patterson does a good job w/ eerie limited-light cinematography, w/ lots of low-to-the-ground tracking shots as we follow the two young protagonists along the twilight and nighttime half-deserted streets of their small New Mexico town; everything is lonely and deserted and eerie, as most of the town is in the h.s. at a basketball game. The two leads – played w/ some nice panache by Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick – are aspiring broadcast journalists: The guy works night shift at the town’s only radio station and the girl, still in h.s., moonlights running the town switchboard (the film is set in the ‘50s, and the switchboard is needed for all phone connections). OK, I rarely give up key plot points and spoilers, but there’s no other way to talk about this film, w/ its hint of a plot and its major letdowns. As the 2 protagonists, Everett and Fay, begin their shift, Fay receives phone calls w/ strange musical sounds; she calls Everett and asks him to listen – and he broadcasts the sounds. This leads to two calls: A man calls the station and tells them that these sounds emanate from a secret military sight he’d been assigned to build while in the service (only soldiers of color were given his dangerous duty, he says). Then a woman calls the station and, in essence, tells them that the sound is a signal from a UFO that had visited the town years ago and abducted her son; she wants to back to where she believes this UFO hovers so that she can be abducted and join her son. Got it? Well, that’s it! There’s no mystery, no ambiguity, no skepticism, no fear, no explanation, no plot twist – nothing. It’s just a visualization of what the supposed UFO sights in NM (and the secret alleged military sights in Nev.) might look like. Questions are neither raised nor answered: why here, why now, why did nobody know about the past visits – this list could go on. Not to mention, though I will mention, what about the absurd plot dynamics? For example, both Everett and Fay leave their posts and go off to interview, at some length, this woman with the UFO tale. Would they leave the station and the switchboard unattended in order to hear out the most unlikely and unhinged of narratives? Any film on this topic, I believe, has to give us a vision or who the “aliens” might be, if they are real at all, and how their presence, or rumored presence, affects the life of a community. This movie promises way more that it can or wishes to deliver.