NIGHTSTREAM 2020: The Night
NIGHTSTREAMFor anybody wanting to relive the claustrophobic terror of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or perhaps experience it through a new lens, Kourosh Ahari’s The Night is the answer. The Iranian horror film about a family of three trapped in an eerie hotel for one long night, is a modern update of Kubrick’s seminal work. Although the similarities are many – creepy concierge, creepy children, possible hallucinations, a father driven mad and even a wizened Black man who offers sage advice to the hero – Ahari’s film manages to differentiate itself enough to provide for a brand new viewing experience.
The Night follows two relatively new parents, Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Jafarian), who find themselves staying at a suspiciously empty hotel one night called the Hotel Normandie. The film differs in two significant ways from The Shining. The first is a lesson from the movie that was never learned: the value of ambiguity. Part of the enduring appeal of Kubrick’s classic is the openness to interpretation that rewards multiple viewings and promotes lively discussions. However, while writer-director Ahari should be praised for bringing up as many questions as The Shining did, he sells himself short by answering nearly all of them. The questions are often more enticing than the answers.
The second significant deviation is in its central characters. Babak and Neda are Muslims living in America, and while that fact is never explicitly brought up, the division between them and the other Americans they encounter couldn’t be more clear. Tensions bubble below the surface during a confrontation with a white police officer, and all of the authorities the couple turn to in their hour of need refuse to be of service. Ahari might not have set out to make a political statement, but the images put up on screen are open to interpretation. Perhaps the film is a metaphor for the fears of being a Muslim in America.
One area in which Ahari tries to emulate the success of The Shining most obviously is the environment. With the help of cinematographer Maz Makhani, Ahari establishes a suitably tense atmosphere through carefully orchestrated camerawork and the occasional handheld close-up. As the scares and intensity increase, so too does the franticness of the camera, executing whip-pans and contrazooms with freakish speed. Several times, the film even replicates The Shining’s famous steadicam shots with a seemingly disembodied camera that glides across the hotel hallways.
Sometimes, Ahari undercuts the beautifully unsettling atmosphere he has constructed with cheap jump scares underscored by string-fuelled music from Nima Fakhrara. The film would have done well to remember in those instances that sometimes, silence can be golden.
The film’s performances, on the other hand, never falter. Hosseini, a veteran actor who has earned prestige working with Asghar Farhardi, goes all out in showcasing the slowly deteriorating mind of Babak. His manic, paranoid performance is so unnerving that his fear will surely become the audience’s. Newcomer Jafarian, in her first serious leading role, is every bit Hosseini’s equal, beautifully conveying the worry in Neda’s eyes, as she is at first unsure of whether or not her husband is hallucinating and later as she fears for her child’s safety.
While The Night never reaches the dizzying heights of The Shining, a movie that’s even half as good as Kubrick’s is still a great film, and Ahari’s directorial outing is surely that. As cerebral and mind-bending as they come, The Night is a disturbing trip into the surreal, the unknown and the frighteningly real.
