A head-snapper of a debut from Andrew Patterson, “The Vast of Night” is one of those eerie indies that uses the trappings of genre (alien invasion in this case) as a launchpad into its own brand of American weird. Located somewhere to the left of a lost “X-Files” episode set in the UFO-haunted 1950s, it unspools over the course of one night in a flyspeck New Mexico border town. Mysterious events are afoot and nobody seems aware of it at first except for two meddling teenagers.
Fay (Sierra McCormick), the town’s nighttime switchboard operator, notices a strange cycling frequency coming in. Then calls start getting cut off. A woman dials in to claim something is over her house before also being disconnected. Science-obsessed and outfitted with giant cat-eye glasses, Fay has a Nancy Drew scrappiness that makes her more intrigued than frightened by these developments. For help, she turns to Everett (Jake Horowitz), the slightly older, quasi-Beatnik local DJ who everyone thinks she has a crush on for the way she is always dashing after him. The two put the strange frequency out over the radio to see if anybody recognizes it. Somebody does.
Working from a tight and angular two-hander of a script from James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, Patterson paints an expansive dark landscape around these characters that, at times, puts the mystery in the background. The movie is propelled through one tensely crafted scene after another by a variety of canny tricks that give a rich texture to this surprisingly beautiful low-budget affair. Some scenes are framed as though being watched on an old black-and-white TV, while others sprawl and zoom with ridiculously assured long takes from cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz (the similarly beautiful but far more staidly shot “Resistance”).
In addition to the swoon-worthy atmospherics—besides the lushly colored and smoky interiors, the film gets a lot of visual mileage out of the particulars of old reel-to-reel recorders and broadcast tech—“The Vast of Night” also impresses with its deft ability to ping-pong moods without losing its overall sensibility of romantic suspense. The introductory sequences at a crowded high school basketball game are almost comically over-the-top in their buzzing and snapping walk-and-talk style. Everett talks a self-consciously hep rap around his omnipresent cigarette and hamming it up like some small-town Alan Freed. Fay anxiously flutters and sparks at his side as though they were in a high school-set screwball comedy scripted by Aaron Sorkin after mainlining Howard Hawks.
After setting that peppy pace, Patterson has the confidence to downshift multiple times into unexpected and moodily elongated soliloquies that both explain and obscure the source of the unknown frequency. (Aliens? Soviets? The U.S. military?) The skrilling soundtrack and taut editing make for a propulsive experience, even though the movie ultimately hints more than reveals.
While it nods to everything from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Patterson’s movie is more a tribute to the romance of a breeze-whispered sprawling night and the shivery thrill of not knowing what nameless threats it hides. [A]
“The Vast of Night” is playing select theaters now and will arrive on Amazon Prime Video on May 29.