Director Benjamin Caron and actor Vanessa Kirby have previously worked together to great effect: Caron directed the episode of The Crown which netted Kirby an Emmy for her role as Princess Margaret. Caron and Kirby’s latest collaboration, the Netflix film Night Always Comes, is in all other respects the polar opposite of The Crown. While one could be tempted to applaud the range of both director and actor for tackling both the British royal family and crime and poverty in Portland, Oregon, the glossy ineffectualness of Night Always Comes suggests that this grittier milieu is an uncomfortable fit for both.
Kirby leads the film as Lynette, an economically and emotionally stressed woman who holds down several part-time jobs and lives with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who has Down syndrome and is cared for by both women. Their late landlord’s son is selling the house they have lived in for years, and while Lynette put together an offer to buy the house, Doreen uses the $25,000 intended for the deposit to buy a new car. The owner, who has given Lynette multiple extensions, gives her an ultimatum that she must deposit $25,000 by the next morning, or he will accept a competing offer on the house. Suddenly faced with homelessness, Lynette begins an all-night hunt for the substantial sum she needs, veering into criminal activity, violence, and brushes with her traumatic past over the course of her quest.
The film is dominated by Kirby’s performance, and while Kirby is a resourceful actor, certain aspects of the role grate against her style and individual qualities. As a performer, Kirby projects magnetic strength, instinctually maintaining status and dignity even in compromised situations. This serves her well in patrician roles like Princess Margaret, but also in roles like Tallie in Mona Fastvold’s 2021 period drama The World to Come, in which she is called upon to maintain an air of mystery and allure while enduring perpetual hardship. Lynette, as written in Sarah Conradt’s screenplay adapted from a novel by Willy Vlautin, is desperate from the start and grows increasingly frantic as events spiral out of control, never achieving the upper hand. Kirby effectively embodies her character’s tunnel-vision focus and the lingering effects of past abuse, but Kirby’s inherent control and reserve make the distance between the actor and the role all too apparent. Another, more surface-level problem is nonetheless distracting: Kirby looks immaculate for the film’s duration, glowing at a wattage higher than any of the actors surrounding her, even as she is meant to grow increasingly more disheveled, so that it is difficult to fully buy into her character’s strife.
Caron’s direction is distinctive by streaming standards, but he can’t quite transcend Netflix’s bland house style. The film has a flat digital sheen, though director of photography Damián García does take some opportunities to craft interesting frames, such as when he highlights the rippling textures of windows on high-rise buildings and reflections in parking lot puddles. A preponderance of drone shots of Portland and periodic intertitles dictating the exact time of night suggest that the film assumes a distracted viewer who needs constant reminders of where the film takes place and how much time has elapsed. Despite these subtle indications that, no matter the intentions of the artists involved, Netflix movies are inherently designed to function as second-screen experiences, Caron locates depth and complexity in some scenes Kirby shares with characters from Lynette’s past and present, portrayed by an eclectic assortment of character actors. Leigh and Gottsagen give naturalistic performances that anchor the story in a base reality, while some of the more unpredictable secondary characters are played by the likes of Julia Fox and Stephan James, who add unique tonal color through their distinctive screen presences.
Where Caron falters most notably is in pacing and, critically, the film’s narrative content itself. The fateful one-night setup requires consistent and escalating tension, yet the film’s scenes and transitions tend to feel choppy, and around the film’s midpoint, the pace lags for a sustained stretch. The forward momentum never fully accelerates to begin with, and what tension did exist cannot be regained after the film’s baggy middle. On the level of content, the question of stakes nags. Lynette understandably frets over losing her home, but Doreen’s nonchalance in response to this threat raises the question of how dire their situation actually is, and the film’s anticlimactic conclusion suggests that Doreen, though callous, may have had a more realistic response to their situation than Lynette. Even taking the urgency Lynette feels as appropriate, her actions become so extreme so quickly — without revealing too many details, she intentionally causes grievous bodily harm to multiple people — that the film risks alienating the viewer’s sympathy too completely. While attempting to take an empathetic view of contemporary poverty in the United States within the frame of a thriller, Caron’s missteps in both form and content result in the failure of Night Always Comes as both a social critique and as an engaging piece of genre cinema.
DIRECTOR: ddd; CAST: Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephan James, Zack Gottsagen; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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