“The Vast of Night” (2019) is the Art of Film Making at Its Best (Part I of II)

(6.5/10)

At the core, all movies are about storytelling. Many do this poorly and only the distinguished few do it memorably, but all films have the two components of the “story” and the “telling”.

For the most part, the “story” component gets all the attention. Audiences are always looking for an unusual story and critics are all too keen on slamming a predictable one. But even a great story is totally wasted if it’s not told well, and in fact, a movie can get a lot of mileage just out of the way in which the story is told.

“The Vast of Night” (2019) is one of those films.

The film’s story is neither novel or complicated. This is the Cold War 1950s and good friends Everett (Jake Horowitz), a radio jockey, and Fay (Sierra McCormick), a switchboard operator, are working the night shift in their respective jobs while the entire town is at the local gymnasium, watching the season-opening high school basketball game. The run-of-the-mill evening turns unusual when Fay catches a hissing sound that she doesn’t recognize. She calls up Everett, who is working the radio, but he doesn’t recognize the sound either and decides to broadcast the noise over the airwaves to see if anyone in the audience knows what it is.

This is a Sci-Fi film in which unexplainable phenomenon occur in a small town, so there’s not much of a mystery in where the story is headed. But focusing on the plot misses the point, for the film is really about Everett and Fay themselves rather than what’s happening to them. The mysterious sound is just providing context to the friendship of two ordinary people as they take on an adventure one random night.

And in telling the story of these two, the film exhibits film-making at its best.

(Continues to Part II)