Initially, I thought The Night was going to be an Iranian film imported into America. It turns out, the opposite is true: The Night is an American-Iranian film, and the first American production to be released in Iranian theaters in decades. While the film features Iranian actors and a great deal of the production is in Farsi, this is a very American film. The Night is a classic haunting: Two people stuck in a single location with a malevolent force, trying their best to survive. At its worst, it feels like we fed the Blumhouse back catalog into an AI and asked it to generate a script. And at its best, it manages to be a wonderfully-acted piece about the fractures in a relationship spreading like a spider-web of cracks under pressure. Sadly, there’s only so much the actors can do.
“Welcome to the Hotel Normandie.”
Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Noor) appear to be… well, not happily married, necessarily. There is a tension in their relationship. But things aren’t bad between them. Leaving a fun evening with a group of friends, Babak decides he’s sober enough to drive home. But right away, odd things are happening. Their GPS seems lost. They hit something, but nothing is there when they get out to check. Neda, eyes on their infant daughter, suggests that they pull into a hotel and sleep it off before driving the rest of the way home. Babak doesn’t like the idea, but he goes along with it.
They stop at the Hotel Normandie. The doorman (George Maguire) lets them in. He seems… a bit off, but he has a room free and they need it, so they sign in. And that’s when the weirdness begins to escalate for them. Voices and footsteps resound in an empty hall. Doubles of people appear in odd places. And someone seems to be following them. Can Babak and Neda face their personal ghosts and survive… The Night? (I’m so sorry, I couldn’t resist)
“Don’t ever push the door.”
The early parts of The Night are incredibly strong. As we set up the story, writer/director Kourosh Ahari gives his two leads distinctive, casual introductions. They’re playing party game Mafia with friends before dinner. It’s an apt set-up: Mafia is a game that asks you how well you can tell when the people around you are hiding something. In an ill portent, Babak and Neda are not very good at it. But after that, the movie just spends some time… relaxing. Babak has drinks with an old friend. Neda catches up with the women. It’s casual, with a creepy atmostphere but a relaxed vibe I genuinely enjoyed.
A lot of that comes down to the two leads. Shahab Hosseini is probably the more well-known of the pair, thanks to his collaboration with much loved director Asghar Farhadi in About Elly, A Separation, and The Salesman. Hosseini here is playing Babak as a caring partner who has a distance to him. At first, it seems like it might be related to his persistent toothache; as the film goes on, we realize that the distance is deeper and perhaps crueler than we assumed. And yet, I never totally turned against him, thanks in part to Hosseini’s subtle performance.
Niousha Noor has a bit less to do than Hosseini, but she is still quite good. Noor’s Neda is more open to what’s happening than Hosseini is, and more terrified. She is quicker to recognize what is happening to them, and I think the movie would have been stronger to do more with the push-pull between Neda and Babak. Instead, at a certain point, Neda is reduced to a terrified woman, but the movie never commits to pushing her towards the sheer harrowing terror of something like Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Her part of the story just kind of… ends, a betrayal of the work Noor put into the character.
“The more you struggle, the deeper you get in.”
Where The Night falters is when the horror overtakes the psychological drama. The scares boil down to three basic tools: A spooky sound is where it shouldn’t be, a mysterious figure that shouldn’t be there, or uncertainty over what’s real or what isn’t. Those are pretty broad tools, but the movie uses them in such limited ways. There are really only a couple recurring figures — a woman and a child — neither of whom does much creepy. The sounds are a bit more diverse, but still pretty limited. And the uncertainty often boils down to, “I thought you were [somewhere else]!” That’s not enough to sustain a horror movie.
And neither, sadly, is the reveal. I won’t spoil it here, but I suspect you’ll figure out what’s going on long before the characters do. Even the mechanism for the haunting, as underexplained as it is, felt like the wrong combination of obvious and meaningless. Ahari is solid with characters, and the script has a handful of inventive scares and eerie dialogue, but ultimately, it felt like a thirty minute short film about a married couple hitting a moment of crisis that accidentally got fed into the horror wringer. And while that can be appealing (see: The Nest), it doesn’t really seem to mean anything here. In The Nest, horror aesthetics heightened the repressed emotions of a family in crisis; here, they just seem to add jump scares.
That said, there were a handful of truly excellent scenes. One standout involves a police officer, called by Babak when they thought they were being harassed by another guest. Unfortunately, the cop arrives after Babak and Neda have begun to believe that something supernatural might be going on. He has a barely concealed hostility towards the pair that isn’t helped by their muddled responses. But he changes heart when he sees their infant daughter. He asks to hold her, and talks about his own child, in a sequence that alternates rapidly between weird, menacing, and a little funny.
“Have a peaceful night.”
For better and for worse, The Night would fit in well with many of the modern horror offerings of Blumhouse. If you’ve seen a modern haunted house movie, nothing about The Night will be unfamiliar to you. While the Iranian New Wave films often played with idea of filmmaking itself, with the idea of the image compared to the person it represents, The Night is a more standard Western affair. Babak and Neda have secrets. For some reason, the universe has decided to punish them for that. Roll film.
The Night is not unenjoyable, particularly in its first hour. But when I compare it to something like Spiral – another recent low budget psychological thriller that veers into horror – its thinness is evident. Ahari does an admirable job using the horror elements to make the fracture at the heart of their relationship clear… but that fracture is too obvious, and too slim to hold up a film. Give me a deeper, more nuanced story — or go really wild with the haunting! Either works. But when you have a too-obvious story with too-few scares to hide the holes, you have a movie that doesn’t hold together terribly well. Winning performances from the two leads and a few solid moments of tension early in the film can’t hide a script that just wasn’t there yet.
The Night is out now on demand, released by IFC Midnight. Directed by Kourosh Ahari and written by Ahari and Milad Jarmooz, The Night stars Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor.