Andrew Patterson’s Alien Invasion Film Fest Fave ‘The Vast of Night’ Makes You Listen Up

The first thing that director Andrew Patterson’s new film The Vast of Night does is teach you how to watch it. After a brief framing device that submits the film we’re about to see as an episode of the Twilight Zone-style anthology show “Paradox Theater,” the opening fifteen-or-so minutes throw the audience into a familiar setting with familiar characters, rendered unfamiliar by a novel method of filmmaking (the film will be available for Amazon Prime subscribers to watch on Friday, May 29). We’re in Cayuga, a small town like any other in late-’50s New Mexico, the combination of time and place connoting alien activity to a modern in-the-know viewer. The evening will indeed revolve around suspected extraterrestrials, but Patterson makes it clear that this close encounter will still be far, far removed from what’s come before.

“We knew we were playing with the same ingredients as a good chunk of sci-fi,” Patterson tells Decider from his home in Oklahoma. “We had no worries about admitting that, it was always part of the game. We wondered how we do something new with pieces that are the same? First, the way people talk and act in the script, we wanted that to feel different than usual for the genre. I thought of the French New Wave movies I loved, where they just happen to turn down the path of sci-fi. Stylistically, we changed the schemes of editing, trying to cut as little as possible. We wanted to keep cues to be scared to a minimum.”

From a distance, the camera follows teens Fay (Sierra McCormick) and Everett (Jake Horowitz) as they bustle about a varsity basketball game in progress. He tricks a member of the pep band into handing off a trombone, she’s got a brand-new tape recorder she’s eager to show off. They eventually mosey out of the gymnasium and into the parking lot to give the gear a test run by conducting impromptu interviews with the folks idling in their cars. Patterson captures this entire sequence in wide shots, with overlapping, slang-laden dialogue that moves along at a brisk clip. Because the actors’ mouths aren’t visible and their faces remain too distant to convey emotion, the film tacitly instructs its audience to listen up, and hard.

These conversations don’t serve the usual purposes of first-act dialogue, such as clarifying who these characters really are and what they’ve set out to do. On first glance, the chatter seems inconsequential. The second time around, it plays like a crash course in active engagement. The film demands your full attention. If you tune out, even for a moment, you will get left behind. 

“It was built into the script that our audience would have to meet the movie on our terms,” Patterson says. “The formal language of the first act says, ‘We’re gonna get there in a little while.’ We’ll get to the close-ups, we’ll get to exposition. You’re gonna be stuck in small rooms with these characters for sixtyish minutes, so you don’t have to be in a hurry. We don’t need to tighten up on their faces to give you clues about what’s going on. We let you know how these characters feel, who they are, what they believe, through dialogue. We didn’t need to play the game of meaningful glances and furrowed foreheads.”

Those “small rooms” Patterson mentions refer to Cayuga’s radio station, where Everett reigns as late-night DJ, and the town switchboard, where Fay connects the locals to the rest of the world. They both work jobs oriented around audio, so that was where Patterson invested the lion’s share of his creative energies. Everett broadcasts over the call sign WOTW, a boldfaced reference to Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” on-air hoax, and a nod to the radio-play traditions that helped shape his approach. Patterson creates an immersive rural atmosphere through little more than talk, with Everett and Fay as the conduit for communication through the whole area.

Our leads speak in a localized pidgin combining hep-cat lingo (“that razzes my berries”) with the sort of regionalisms that naturally develop when a town only has one of everything. “Everybody lives in a small town, whether they know it or not, and it’s no more than a couple dozen people,” Patterson explains. “That can be the people you live near, the people you work with, your friends, or in the case of where I grew up, the people who went to the restaurants you did. You had a shorthand with them. It was not odd to run in the same circle of one hundred people in the same places — ice cream shop, gas station.” A lifelong resident of Oklahoma, he’s got an intuitive sense for that insularity from his boyhood years in a town of approximately 25,000.

As the night rolls on, Fay and Everett both get an earful of an eerie sonic soup somewhere between speaker feedback and strangled speech. Their joint effort to parse its meaning and origin from their respective control rooms may be small in scale, but that never meant a simplification to go along with it. Patterson kept costs low by building an ersatz radio booth and switchboard in the locker room of the gymnasium he refers to as his “hero location,” and spending the majority of his run time there. One standout scene observes as Fay works her board, plugging and unplugging as she juggles multiple conversations at once. A complicated undertaking for Patterson as writer and McCormick as actress, it only flies because the viewer’s been primed to keep their ears peeled. 

“The number-one challenge of the switchboard scene was an understanding of the technology,” Patterson says. “It was about knowing how it would work in a town of that size, in that year, because things were changing already. We had to learn a lot about how many lines would exist, how many per home, crucial details to be hammered out for that scene to work. We had to build a bit of mystery by criss-crossing the plot through her.” 

From the largely static image of a girl sitting in a chair, the film generates crackling action through its gift of gab and ambient suspense. Those two elements come together most thrillingly in a somewhat experimental centerpiece, in which Everett takes a call from a man claiming to have information about the mystery frequency. As he unspools his yarn, the screen fades to black and stays there. His voice continues, but the screen remains dark as entire minutes tick by. Everett fades back into view, just as raptly tuned-in as the viewer, and fades back out. We’re left with nothing but the words. Patterson fought hard to keep this crucial passage of pure sound intact as he began the process of bringing his film to the world.

“We had some great sales agents, because I told them from the outset that the movie was locked and could not be changed, and they made that work,” Patterson recalls. “Anybody that wanted this movie would get this version, and so there wasn’t even a conversation about the blackout sequence. The only thing that was a discussion point was length of time, during editing. There was a window when it was twelve, ten. It took a lot of time to refine, get it feeling right.”

He successfully cleared the hurdle of artistic compromise, but the path to the public still held a major obstacle. Patterson thought he’d hit it big when Amazon purchased the distribution rights and announced plans for a bona fide theatrical rollout at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. When the breakout of the coronavirus pandemic brought the film industry to a screeching halt, however, the fate of The Vast of Night became cloudy. He’s got no objection whatsoever to the digital rollout Amazon’s planning, and he’s particularly intrigued by the prospect of his retro throwback playing at drive-ins, an eminently appropriate venue for the subject matter.

“When we put this movie out, we had no expectation of where it would play,” Patterson says. “Unfortunately, and I mean this for everyone, we can’t spend time together like we used to. But we saw an opportunity, considering how this movie’s been crafted, to put it in a venue that could be special during this time. We’ve talked to some people who have seen it in a drive-in, and there’s a great effect in the first fifteen to twenty minutes, when they’re walking around from car to car in the parking lot, that makes you feel like they could walk right up to you. I’m happy with what people are getting from this experience.”

As Patterson remains hard at work on two developing scripts from home (“when you’re working on a script, you assume a lifestyle that’s not so different from quarantining,” he maybe-jokes), his debut will trickle out to a captive audience well-geared for it. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, we’ve got no choice but to sit still and listen. Patterson’s got America’s ear, and he’s not letting the chance to be heard go to waste.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Watch The Vast of Night on Amazon Prime