Opiniões dos críticos

Despite an obviously limited budget, Patterson and his skilled cinematographer M.I. Littin Menz have given The Vast of Night a polished, professional look, punctuated by sinuous tracking shots and featuring better-than-expected acting.

The Vast of Night is debut filmmaker Andrew Patterson’s riff on black-and-white nostalgia, featuring the kinds of quippy fast-paced conversations standard in the ’40s and ’50s, with a fondness for the hand-built and the hand-cranked.

What we get is a talky, brisk, and unexpectedly creepy—even moving—bit of Southwestern folklore.

The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.

The Vast of Night is a homage to genre shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, even featuring its own faux credits montage, but it’s truly a riff on the intimacy of radio dramas.

"The Vast of Night" doesn't come to you. You must go to it. You must submit to its rules, and once you do, it yields tremendous rewards. Patterson's style, in partnership with cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz, infuses these well-worn plot points with urgency, creating an overriding mood of strangeness and mystery.

Despite an obviously limited budget, Patterson and his skilled cinematographer M.I. Littin Menz have given The Vast of Night a polished, professional look, punctuated by sinuous tracking shots and featuring better-than-expected acting, both by its leads (whose mutual geekiness is believably yoked to the gee-whiz period) and a cast of voice actors whose seen-but-not-heard performances are tremendously effective.

For me, The Vast of Night was the kind of discovery that one comes to Park City for, a display of visionary moviemaking intelligence equal to that of my most memorable Utah experiences; Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko or Shane Carruth’s Primer, or for that matter, Christopher Nolan’s Following, which also premiered at Slamdance.