Andrew Patterson (2019)

This science-fiction mystery was made quickly and relatively cheaply, which could explain why its several unusual features include not including a director’s name in the credits.  Andrew Patterson appears there only pseudonymously – as James Montague, who shares the screenplay credit with Craig W Sanger (not a pseudonym!).  Patterson, whose first feature this is, uses a television screen-within-the-screen:  he presents his story as an episode of a TV show called ‘Paradox Theater’, which has its own credits.  Maybe that complication proved distracting and caused the omission.  If this rookie director’s self-effacement is intentional, though, it’s unnecessary.  The Vast of Night is irritating at the start and, in one way, anti-climactic at the end but it delivers a fine middle and plenty of other good things (including a splendid title).

Paradox Theater is clearly inspired by The Twilight Zone.  Rod Serling’s introduction to the latter situated his creations in ‘the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition’.  The corresponding voiceover for Paradox Theater describes its territory as ‘caught between logic and myth’.  The Twilight Zone started life on CBS in 1959, which looks to be around the time The Vast of Night is set (it’s certainly post-October 1957 – there’s a reference to Sputnik).  The story is introduced, as a Paradox Theater piece, in flickering black-and-white.  The screen then expands, the images turn to colour and the film’s narrative gets underway.

Perhaps Paradox Theater nods secondarily to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, responsible for the notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds.  For the first fifteen minutes or so, The Vast of Night is a bit like a radio play.  The talk comes thick and fast, its hectic quality reinforced by a difficulty in matching voices to characters on screen.  The action takes place in nearly real time one dark evening in the (fictional) small town of Cayuga, New Mexico.  Miguel Ioann Littin Menz’s lighting is aptly crepuscular but it’s hard at first to tell who’s who.  Even when the two main characters emerge to dominate proceedings, you’re initially conscious of them as a pair of voices – or, at least, a pair of voices and two pairs of dark-framed spectacles that overcome the gloom.  These belong to sixteen-year-old telephone switchboard operator Fay Crocker (Sienna McCormick) and local radio DJ Everett ‘The Maverick’ Sloan (Jake Horowitz).  His near namesake, Everett Sloane, was a member of Mercury Theatre and starred in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Fay has just become the proud owner of a tape-recorder; Everett shows her how to use it.  As they move around the environs of a gymnasium before a basketball game there, Everett records a pretend interview with Fay and vox pops in the car park, where folks are arriving to watch the game.  Andrew Patterson (according to Wikipedia) self-financed hispicture with earnings from work producing promotional films for an Oklahoma City basketball team.  They may or may not have supplied the players used in The Vast of Night (which was shot in Whitney, Texas) but the basketball game plays a doubly important role, even though we see little of what happens in it.  This major local event means the town outside the gymnasium is largely empty.  That suits Patterson’s low-budget purposes and links to a theme of the drama that develops.

Although it’s wearing and disorienting, the opening talk has a dual payoff.  Tape-recordings, and other disembodied voices, will matter in what follows.  The incessant chat will contrast with more extraordinary noises, and with passages of virtual silence.  (The ingenious sound designers are Johnny Marshall and David Rosenblad.)  When she starts her stint at the telephone exchange, Fay gets calls which, when she answers them, consist of a spooky unnerving buzz on the line.  One call that does have a human voice on the other end comes from a terrified woman who’s seen something scary arrive on her land.  This conversation, and others that Fay starts with members of her family, are interrupted by the buzz.  Fay contacts the local police station but the officers are at the basketball.  She then phones Everett and plays him the extraordinary sound.  When he records and broadcasts it on his radio show, calls come in from two people who claim they’ve heard it before.

A man introducing himself as Billy tells Everett of how, on military detail some years ago, he was involved in helping build a bunker to house a large, unidentified craft.  Travelling back from the isolated facility where the work took place, Billy heard on a plane radio the same mysterious noise that Everett has played over the air.  Billy later developed a lung condition, as did a colleague with whom he worked on the project.  Another of his friends recorded the signal and sent a copy to, among others, a now-deceased air force officer resident in Cayuga.  The well-informed Fay happens to know this man’s collection of tapes was bequeathed to the local library.  Even though her work shift isn’t over, she dashes to the library and steals them.

When Everett tries to broadcast this further recording, the radio station’s power is knocked out.  Back at the telephone exchange, the switchboard is now flooded with calls reporting ‘something in the sky’.  A woman called Mabel Blanche, as well as recognising the sound, says she has plenty more to tell Everett but insists on meeting him to do so.  When he and Fay go to see her, Mabel (Gail Cronauer) doesn’t disappoint although her monologue isn’t as compelling as the sound-only contribution of Billy (Bruce Davis).  Mabel’s account is almost comically lengthy, especially given that Everett has prefaced their meeting with a warning that he and Fay don’t have a lot of time.

Still, Mabel does impart plenty of relevant information.  Her visitors arrive to hear her chanting words in an incomprehensible language – it’s the same chant, she goes on to explain, she’s heard certain other people utter.  They include her only son, shortly before his unexplained disappearance, never to be seen again – on a night, Mabel says, like the present one.  She has a theory that aliens, from whose spacecraft the weird chant seems to be some kind of communication, abduct humans from especially isolated places.  Cayuga on the night of a big game for the local basketball team evidently fits the bill (even if it’s not sufficiently isolated to prevent numerous alarmed calls to Fay’s switchboard) …

UFO sightings go back a long way but their frequency and popular appeal seem to have peaked in the years following World War II.  The premise of C G Jung’s late essay Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky is characteristically complex, both high flown and down to earth.  Jung describes UFOs as a ‘projection-creating fantasy [that] soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets’.  He nevertheless roots the emergence of such fantasy in ‘the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake’.  In retrospect, the UFO craze of the time looks like a strand of Cold War paranoia.  Everett, a young man who doesn’t strike you as a natural Red-alert type, is convinced the unnerving goings-on are the Soviets at work.

During the first half-hour, Andrew Patterson punctuates the narrative two or three times with cuts back to the crackly black-and-white television screen, which tend to break your involvement with the main story.  At least for as long as these continue, The Vast of Night looks set to be no more than a stylish pastiche of various examples of 1950s screen product (with echoes of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers sub-genre of sci-fi horror as well as The Twilight Zone).  Yet Patterson has surprises in store.  The camera movement – often at high speed and ground level – is persistently confounding and there are striking, unstressed resonances with present-day preoccupations.  These go beyond Fay’s enthusiastic chatter in the early stages about technological advances on the way (according to a magazine she reads, by the year 2000 you’ll have ‘a miniature television screen and you’ll keep it in your pocket’).  After telling Everett he’s black, Billy goes on to reveal that all his fellow workers on the military detail were African-American or Mexican – were people, in other words, whose voices, should they decide to speak up about their experiences, were relatively unlikely to be heard.  Even as Everett’s diagnosis illustrates American anxieties of six decades back, a present-day audience can relate to his suspecting the nefarious hand of Russia in the high-tech incursions that destabilise Cayuga.

Patterson doesn’t take the easy way out of the film by leaving things an atmospheric unsolved mystery – it’s a commendable decision albeit the effect is almost inevitably reductive.  The alien craft, when they appear on screen, aren’t fully visible.  Even in the near-darkness, though, they suggest low-budget relatives of the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The protagonists (along with Fay’s baby sister, who enters the picture late in the day) are at last nowhere to be seen.  All that remains in the field where they were stood confronting the craft are their footprints – which (like the footprints of Mabel Blanche’s son years ago) suddenly stop – and Fay’s tape-recorder.  The Vast of Night’s conventionalising direction sets in a while before that.  You don’t expect a piece like this to be primarily a relationships drama but the two leads are good enough, and the interactions of Fay and Everett engaging enough, to make you feel something’s been lost once they’re engaged almost exclusively in detective work.

Yet the finale has ambiguous facets too, which the effective score (by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer) seems to have been predicting.  Although the principals’ disappearance is sinister, the extra-terrestrials aren’t confirmed as malevolent (or benevolent) – and the vanishing strikes a different note in chiming with another element of the story.  Again without overstressing, Patterson, in his creation of local texture, hints at the claustrophobic side of small-town life.  Fay would love to go to college but can’t afford to do so.  Everett has ambitions of a bigger-time broadcasting career than local radio.  The pair’s encounter with out-of-this-world visitors distances them further from their fellow residents who are merely enjoying basketball.  It’s somehow fitting that Fay and Everett get out of Cayuga.  The only way is up.

16 July 2020