The Night

Saw this at the Imagine filmfestival, usually in Amsterdam but now 100% online. There were a few eerie, creepy moments (no jump scares, luckily) but it generally failed to deliver on its promising plot and the even more promising location in the form of a large yet apparently near-empty hotel.

It took us some time to be made aware that the lead couple had hidden secrets and a few other issues. It would have been more effective to include this somewhere earlier in the story to become an integral part of the tense situation. Now we only have the eeriness and the daunting location during the first hour to worry about, and not their relational problems popping up too late to become interesting.

This movie is a mixed bag: acting, photography and the general mood are very, very good. Some scenes are very effective and, indeed, so haunting.

On the other hand, the pacing is kinda slow and too much precious times gets lost with cliché jumpscares and other tricks.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to everyone, but if you like fu**ed up family dynamics and dark places, you should give this a try.

I really enjoyed this title. A good psychological horror or thriller should not only provide you with lots of visualized scenes. It should mess with your mind, make your mind to trick you; So every and each seconds you're perpetually terrified about everything. And that's what exactly this movie does. I was waiting for this title for a long time and sure it was worth it.

I have to start by saying that since this is the debut feature film of Kourosh Ahari, he did a fairly good job in re-imagining the Iranian version of Kubrick's The Shining and the whole haunted house archetype (in this case a hotel) in an American setting. However, the very slow pace of the movie, its predictability, its stereotypical build-ups and jump-scares will fail the movie in making any dazzling impact.

The superb performances by Cannes winner Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor should not go unnoticed.

Right, when I sat down to watch the 2020 movie titled "The Night" I had no idea what the movie was about.

And now that I just sat through and watched the entire movie, I still have no idea what it was about.

This 2020 horror movie is a very strange one. Now, for a horror movie "The Night" is a more sublime type of horror movie, one that creeps under your skin and lingers at the back of your mind. Yeah, "The Night" is not your archetypical horror movie crammed with jump scares, gore and special effects. This is a brooding psychological horror movie of sorts.

I will say that writers Kourosh Ahari and Milad Jarmooz managed to produce a storyline that fully and wholeheartedly threw me off. I had no clue throughout the entire movie what was actually going on. And I still have no clue. I believe this was about a man coming to face his own guilty conscious, I suppose.

As you sit through "The Night", you must keep in mind that the movie is slow paced and director Kourosh Ahari is actually good at building up suspense and letting bits of dread and thrills slip out occasionally to keep things interesting. Sure, I had no idea what was going on, but director Kourosh Ahari managed to keep me riveted to the chair, wanting to see what happens next.

The atmosphere in the movie was really good, as it was genuinely dark and foreboding. So I will say that director Kourosh Ahari managed to put that together nicely enough. Just a shame that the storyline was such a swing and a miss.

I will also say that the acting performances were good and believable. Sure, the movie had a very small group of actors and actresses, but they managed to do well enough with the script and storyline.

If you enjoy psychological horror, then "The Night" should be something for you, I suppose. However, just keep in mind that you are likely to be left out in the dark throughout the course of the entire movie.

My rating of "The Night", despite it having a great atmosphere, ultimately lands on a mediocre five out of ten stars, as I feel like I wasted 1 hour and 45 minutes on something that made zero sense.