Metacritic-Rezensionen

Kourosh Ahari's The Night, about a couple confronting their personal demons in a haunted hotel, is a knockout debut feature—so assured that it stands on its own as a filmmaking achievement apart from its historical significance, which is considerable.

Told mostly in shadows, this is a story of broken trust and haunting guilt. Ahari uses one of the genre’s oldest tropes to remind us that it’s in confronting our demons that we gain the power to overcome them.

Featuring excellent performances by Shahab Hosseini (“A Separation,” “The Salesman”) and Niousha Jafarian (“Here and Now”) as a married couple with a baby daughter and a frayed relationship, this predominantly Farsi-language production sneaks up on viewers and delivers a knockout final act.

A goosebumps-inducing affair, The Night is at its most effectively unsettling when the focus is to evoke fear as opposed to when it physically shows what’s haunting the characters trapped in their respective secret tragedies. Their unseen demons spook harder.

The expert cinematic stylization on display proves ample reason to forgive The Night for any narrative shortcomings.

Ahari’s script is perhaps too focused on the secrets of its central couple, which are compelling but foreshadowed in a belabored way. By the end, the emotional catharsis is dulled somewhat by the sheer obviousness of it all, not to mention the convoluted route Ahari takes to get there.

As a journey inward into the roiling waves of memory and regret, Ahari fulfills his promise with an unapologetic air of penance and disgrace. That its success happens despite his exploitation of Neda as a character and woman doesn’t, however, negate that egregious misstep. And the latter being highly triggering unfortunately renders any blind recommendation of the former a reckless proposition.

It's a slow build to collapse, escaping the traditional trap of such supernatural suspense films in that both of them have secrets, and it's not the acts themselves but the deceits that have led them to this place.

It’s at the juncture between horror and philosophical surrealism that Kourosh Ahari’s film is at its most provocative.

The repetition of the visions and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience too much time to guess which betrayals haunt Babak and Neda, and this lack of emotional suspense hampers the horror.