"The Night" moody and nerve-rattling here and there without fully coming together

 

The Night (2021)


Kourosh Ahari’s feature debut “The Night” is already notable for one thing: this is the first Iranian film produced in the U.S. to receive a license for theatrical release since the Islamic revolution of 1979. It’s also spoken predominantly in Farsi. Beyond that groundbreaking behind-the-scenes tidbit, Ahari and co-writer Milad Jarmooz do admirably shape their simple trapped-in-a-hotel premise into a metaphor for loss, regret, and betrayal. Repurposing a haunted hotel as an inescapable quicksand until truths are confronted, the film employs a tantalizing mode of breadcrumb storytelling with a strikingly eerie mood. While the film rattles the nerves here and there, and keeps one guessing as to where it will lead, “The Night” doesn’t quite come together thematically or dramatically as it should.


After a late evening with close friends in Los Angeles, Iranian couple Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Jafarian) head home with their one-year-old daughter Shabnam. Babak has had too much to drink but insists on driving since Neda’s license is suspended. When their GPS keeps redirecting them and Babak runs over something that is no longer there, the couple checks into the Hotel Normandie for the night. From the outside harbingers of shadowed figures, a black cat, and a homeless man to the strange concierge (George Maguire) who speaks of every tragedy he's witnessed, nothing about this night seems right. Then, besides their baby fussing and keeping them awake, the hellish (and vacant) hotel torments and traps Babak and Neda, forcing them both to face secrets from their past. 


Sections of the slow but steady setup in “The Night” tend to be more effective than the actual payoffs. Writer-director-editor Kourosh Ahari cleverly begins his story with party game Mafia, where Babak, Neda, and their friends point fingers and accuse each other of keeping secrets. An off-kilter atmosphere is already set before the central couple checks into the Art Deco-styled Hotel Normandie, a real historical boutique hotel that could lose a lot of check-ins after this film. The spooky old hotel speaks for itself, but the playful sensuality of "I Wanna Be Loved by You" playing in the lobby is an ominous counterpoint, and the roof's neon sign creating a red haze through the windows of the hotel room just creates more foreboding. Ahari also trusts in holding a shot to build apprehension and he knows how to dole out a socko jolt like the increasing sound of nails being filed, even if it’s accompanied by a musical stinger. The craft of the filmmaking is never an issue, nor are the allusions to “The Shining.” A bloodied body in a bathtub besides, pay attention and there is even one impossibility in the floor plan of Babak and Neda’s hotel room, primarily the bathroom where a window to the actual outside should not exist.


As it goes with most haunted house films, it does take a long time for Babak and Neda to get on the same page until they both witness something they cannot explain. Chalk up Neda's initial disbelief to Babak's toothache-dulling vodka shots and exhaustion, but all of the supernatural horrors seem to be of the characters' own making and in the service of the universal human condition. Both Babak and Neda have skeletons to confront, and Hotel Normandie will not let them leave until everything is out in the open. Ghostly presences in horror movies have been haunting characters for the same reason for years, and even in this case, the same goes for one-half of the characters. 


Instead of building to a walloping betrayal between the squabbling Neda and Babak, the revelations come off inevitable and a little half-baked. Not that more hand-holding was necessary, but only certain details manage to stack up cohesively, whether it’s Neda’s desire to have another baby, Babak and Neda’s inscrutable matching tattoos, or the couple’s doctor friend never finishing his story about losing a young patient. The performances by Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Jafarian are strong, and they do convincingly give petrified faces as the stubborn Babak and the more-sympathetic Neda. With the most recent “His House” not far enough in the rearview mirror, where “The Night” comes up short only magnifies how that film more deftly melded an immigration story about grief and survivor’s guilt with bumps in the night. Frustratingly, this is one of those cases where a film comes thisclose to sticking the landing.


Grade: C +


IFC Midnight is releasing “The Night” (106 min.) in select theaters and on digital platforms and VOD on January 29, 2021.

Comments