On a quiet night in late-1950s New Mexico, a switchboard operator and a late-night radio DJ start picking up a strange frequency cutting into the airwaves, and the town's attention, already thin because everyone else is at the high school basketball game, narrows to a single question: what is that sound, and where is it coming from.
Andrew Patterson's drama sets up small-town isolation stretched across a single overnight shift, where a signal nobody can explain starts to feel less like a curiosity and more like a countdown. The mood is patient and analog: switchboards, reel-to-reel tape, a radio booth as the only lit room in a sleeping town.
The Vast of Night was Patterson's directorial debut, made on a shoestring budget in Whitney, Texas, and it announces itself through form rather than spectacle. Patterson and cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz built the film around elaborate long takes, including one widely discussed sequence that glides through the length of the town and into a packed gymnasium; it plays as a single unbroken shot but was in fact four separate takes digitally stitched together, with the camera at times mounted on a local resident's go-kart. A six-minute monologue about a wartime radio encounter, held largely in close-up, shows the same commitment to sustained, unshowy scenes.
That formal discipline is the film's argument: Patterson uses long takes, tracking shots, stretches of total darkness and overlapping, rapid-fire dialogue to force sustained attention from the audience. Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz, as the two leads trading theories and half-finished sentences over telephone lines, carry the film's tone through voice and rhythm as much as through what's on screen, since much of the middle section takes place with characters unseen, only heard.
The Vast of Night premiered at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, where it won the festival's Grand Jury Prize after being passed over by other festivals, then played the Toronto International Film Festival, where Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights. It has been available as an Amazon Original on Prime Video in the US since May 2020. Check regional availability on PLOT before pressing play, since studio-original titles can shift by territory.
