Review by Emily Craig (@emillycraig)
Directed by: Gerard Lough
Starring: Michael Parle, Jack Dean-Shepherd, Claire Blennerhassett, Sarah Louise Carney
Recently there has been an influx of well-made indie Irish horror films; for example Citadel (Ciaran Foy, 2012), The Devils’ Woods (Anthony White, 2015) and the very recent fantastic film The Hallow (Hardy, 2015) have all shown extreme promise. Because of this, I was rather intrigued to come across Night People. This is an anthology film split into three main stories which are all connected in some way. The main, base story is about two criminals, Mike (Michael Parle) and Luke (Jack Dean-Shepherd), who are carrying out an insurance scam and waiting to set fire to a house they have broken into. Mike decides that the two should exchange scary stories to pass the time.
Let me just start by saying that this film was extremely hard to get into; I actually had to attempt to watch it four times before I got through the whole film – I just couldn’t get fully immersed and I found the first tale painfully hard to follow and understand.
The first story is about a man named Robert (Aidan O’Sullivan) who finds a mysterious object and gets his science nerd friend Adam (Eoin Leahy) involved to discover what the strange artefact may be; the more the duo become obsessed with the object the more tense their relationship becomes. I found this tale to be the poorer of the two as I found the acting to be a bit iffy and the story too complicated to follow, which led me to feel uninvolved; it did however pick up and had a strong ending, but it wasn’t enough to bring be back.
The second and more superior story told by Luke is about sex worker Faustina (Claire Blennerhassett), who is running a business in which she matches up wealthy clients who share the same fetishes. Faustina wants to get out of the line of work and sacrifices doing dodgy work for a mysterious client in the hope it will bring her a fresh start. This segment was definitely clearer to follow. It didn’t feel as lengthy and had more interesting characters; the two female leads in the film - Blennerhassett and Sarah Louise Carney, who plays Lillian - were superb.
I personally had more interest in the overall outcome of the two characters in the base story, so I was pleasantly surprised at the ambiguously executed finale. The director Gerard Lough was influenced by films and music of the '80s and I could definitely see that throughout the film, particularly in the superb soundtrack. In all honesty, I found Night People just OK because the first segment really did let the whole film down; I think this particular part of the film could have definitely been rethought and made a lot shorter.
