Night (2019)

A torture/snuff streamer abducts a young girl on a quiet night, and from there things go from creepy to disturbing.

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The tl;dr Review:

Nicholas Michael Jacobs has definitely made a unique horror film here.

While, on a personal note, it does seem to venture very uncomfortably far into snuff film territory, I do appreciate the straightforward approach to the story.

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The Full Review:

Indie horror often means one can go outside of the box in terms of what they want to create. There are less studio boundaries, and one’s creativity is as high as they want it to be.

Night is definitely one of the more straightforward films, but also kind of uniquely different. It’s technically a found footage film, but it has content that I wouldn’t have expected to see in a found footage film. The execution is very, very different, and as such creates an entirely different type of product.

Night copies snuff films to a disturbingly close note, though it changes it up slightly (can’t go into that).

Judy (the victim) and Adam (the abductor) are at the centre of this, and their dynamic is kind of unexpected. Buuuut, again, can’t go into that. What I will say is that the performances were pretty good.

There’s even a tiny bit of practical effect use in this, and it sort of works well enough that it doesn’t break your suspension of disbelief. Though that’s more due to the camera angles and lighting, which were used well enough and for full enough effect.

I’m actually not sure how to properly grade the dialogue. It’s, from my opinion, good, but I mean, what bar do I compare it to? The Poughkeepsie Tapes was a vastly different film, though plot elements do contain mild similarities, Hostel is a bit too far off. I guess Guinea Pig (Japanese torture-horror film), but even that’s different. What I will say is that Night manages to slip in context that I wasn’t expecting, but am glad to have gotten.

It’s the context that separates this from being a snuff film. Night is still torture-horror and found footage, and it’s honest about that throughout, but it still has enough to make it stand out.

Overall, Night made me feel what I think I should feel when watching something like this: uncomfortable and disturbed, though I was rooting for the victim throughout, as hopeless a situation as that kind of situation is.

In other words, I liked it.

I recommend checking it out when it premieres in less than an hour on povhorror.com (you can use their free trial to check it out).

For clarification, that’s March 17, so for some of you, it’s out already.

-Joseph