Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kourosh Ahari
Starring: Shabab Hosseini, Niousha Jafarian, George Maguire
Following the likes of Ana Lily Amirpour's
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
and Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow, Kourosh Ahari's directorial debut The Night is
the latest horror movie to emerge from the Persian diaspora. This one holds
the distinction of being the first American produced film to receive a
release in Iran since the Islamic revolution of 1979, thanks in no small
part to the presence of Iranian acting royalty Shahab Hosseini in the
lead role.
The plot of The Night plays like a mash-up of two other
recent movies based around immigrants. Like Ekwa Msangi's
Farewell Amor
it features a husband who leaves his wife for several years to establish
himself in America, and as with Remi Weekes'
His House
it gives us an immigrant couple menaced by a supernatural presence that
forces them to confront the actions of their recent past.
The key difference here is that the immigrant couple at the heart of
The Night aren't on the lowest rung of society's ladder,
rather they're an affluent, upper middle-class family. We meet Babek
(Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Jafarian) at a dinner party in the
Hollywood Hills, where they socialise with similarly comfortable Iranian
ex-pats. Despite having knocked back his fair share of vodka shots, Babek
insists on driving home, but when he almost crashes the car when a black cat
appears in the middle of the road, he acquiesces to his wife's desire to
book themselves and their infant daughter into the nearest hotel.
The nearest hotel happens to be the Hotel Normandie, a classic example of
LA Gothic (a quick google reveals that this is in fact a real life, fully
operational hotel with a 4.5 star rating on Trip Advisor). The creepy
concierge (George Maguire) should be an instant red flag, but it's
1am and our heroes are knackered and so hit the hay without a second thought
until Babek is woken at 3am. This is said to be the time of day when you're
most likely to experience apparitions due to your melatonin levels reaching
their peak, and sure enough, both Babek and Neda begin to have strange
hallucinations. The former sees a beautiful young woman in the hotel lobby
and hovering over his bed, while the latter is taunted by the figure of a
young boy calling out "Mommy, Mommy."
As the night goes on and Babek and Neda find themselves trapped in the
hotel, their experiences become all the more creepy, peaking with a
nerve-wracking visit by a police officer who may or may not be real (this
portion brought back memories of a spooky tale my Dad often related about
how he was once pulled over in the middle of the night by a ghostly traffic
cop).
Ahari doesn't break any new ground with his film, and some of its key
elements (particularly a bit involving a mirror) are a little too
derivative. That said, he knows how to play the notes, and even if
The Night's terrors are somewhat generic, we're kept on the edge of our seat for
most of its running time. This is down to a combination of the convincingly
freaked out and paranoid performances of Hosseini and Jafarian, and Ahari's
ability to generate scares in simple old-school fashion, shunning CG effects
and an overbearing score. In fact, there's almost no onscreen horror here,
with noises in the dark and the petrified faces of Hosseini and Jafarian
working overtime to convince us that the relatively ambiguous Hotel
Normandie might be a portal to Hell.
Like
Bacurau
and
Hunted, The Night takes the trope of Americans being menaced by
foreigners in unfamiliar surrounds and turns it culturally on its head. Much
of American horror is based on a latent fear Americans seem to have
regarding anything old, so it's deliciously ironic that
The Night features protagonists from one of the oldest
civilisations on Earth being terrorised in a hotel that was built in the
1920s (I have a tin of peas in the back of my cupboard older than that!). As
the plot unspools and Babek and Neda begin to realise why they're being
taunted, it becomes clear that it's not some ancient evil they have to
contend with, but a far more recent past they've sought to bury.
