Review: “Vast of Night”

Last year, Andrew Patterson made his “Kitchen Sink” film debut, when he served as writer, producer, director and editor of “Vast of Night.” The sub $1M film can be seen on Amazon Prime and has a Rotten Tomato™ score of 91% Fresh, but the audience score is at 60% however, indicating a rift, which I assume is due to some serious structure flaws, and some very long monologue scenes. Interestingly enough, “Vast of Night” was the Audience Award winner at Slamdance, 2019, and won the Outlook Film Festival Jury Award, among several other nominations for Patterson and the film alike, leading to its release on Prime last week.

First things first, Patterson gets a lot of credit for how he went about this. The high school film fan parlayed into a profitable Oklahoma City production company and used his own money to film “Vast of Night.” This is a rare move in the age of micro-investors. The result however is that Patterson owns the whole film, and anything that comes in from it goes to him alone. That could very well set him up for a nice career if he keeps going along this route.”Vast of Night” is a throwback, literally and figuratively to the nostalgic 1950s and the Twilight Zone era of sci-fi. The film opens in an homage to “The Twilight Zone’s” iconic intro, and introduces us to tonight’s episode, “The Vast of Night.” We follow highs schoolers Fay (Sierra McCormick), a switchboard operator for the local telephone service, and Everett (Jake Horowitz), a DJ at the local radio station, who discover a strange interference in the town’s radio and telephone systems after receiving a panicked phone call about lights in the sky.

The film has the two on a quest trying to find out what the heck is going, which takes a lot of random turns and involves a whole lot of running around. It seems to me that even in the 1950s, if the switchboard operator and the radio DJ left shifts several times for long stretches, eventually abandoning their posts entirely, this would be a horrible idea that would cause a lot of problems, but this happens throughout this movie with little or no consequences.

The actors are interesting, and fun to watch, but Horowitz hams it up as Everett a bit too much for my taste. Gail Cronauer plays Mabel and kills it, reciting a good ten pages of dialogue flawlessly. Bruce Davis appears as the voice of Billy, a call-in to the radio station. Everyone else in the film has very little to do with the main plot, as we mostly follow Fay and Everett running around trying to figure out what’s happening and dealing with other random obstacles. As the film is set in the 1950s, the set design, and wardrobe are important and well used. There are a lot of drippy shots of cool vintage tech in the sweeping short depth of field focus. The lighting and look of the film are on point.

There several long dialogue scenes in the film in which the camera is still, locked or slowly zooming on a medium or closeup shot of one person talking, or having a full-on conversation with people off camera without cutting away for up to ten minutes straight. There are long segments when Billy is on the phone in which the screen literally goes blank. This may be because they could only afford to shoot so much and they had to prioritize, and that maybe that was all they had to present when they were done.

These scenes are intercut, however, with some brilliantly shot scenes with some rich and interesting camera work, including a tremendous long take traveling through the entire small town, including right through the active basketball game. The long monologue takes try to juxtapose the roller coaster shots, but for a film presented for our entertainment, it’s just too much. If the content was super intense and richly belted out by some jaw-dropping actors, you can pull off one or two great monologues in a movie, but even then they won’t be more than a minute or two at most.

“Vast of Night” showcases a whole lot of potential for Patterson, who signed to William Morris a week after Slamdance. Kudos to Miguel Ioann Littin Menz for some really nice cinematography when he was set free. If you like mysterious nostalgic or vintage sci-fi, you will like what this film tries to pay tribute to. In many ways it was a success, but only if you can get through some serious drag. A for effort, but I’m giving Vast of Night 3 out of 5 stars.