My Favourite Underrated Sci-Fi Film: The Vast of Night

On the debut sci-fi talkie from director Andrew Patterson, the likes of which we rarely see, about strange sounds and sights rarely seen

We were always a curious people.

When I was a teenager, I figured we would have flying cars by the time my future self is writing this.

I wondered. We all did.

Wonder is the essence of good science fiction. We are compelled by the magic of our modern technology, no matter the time period.

When I was a kid, I would listen to these cassette tapes my mom and her sisters recorded back in the late 70s. I was always fascinated by the younger voices of people I knew so well. Upon the release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, you better bet I wheeled and dealed for a Talkboy.

Today, we record our lives in sound and pictures.

In the breathtaking final moments of the low-budget 2020 sci-fi masterpiece The Vast of Night, a young man sits in the back of a speeding car with a reel-to-reel tape recorder on his lap, skimming and scanning for a bit of audio — the 1958 equivalent of “Hold on. Let me find that video. It’s on my phone. Give me a sec.”

He needs to hear something again. The reason is unclear. He is fascinated, curious. He has just heard some wild tales — a whirlwind of developments on which to wonder.

One of these companions has confirmed something only a handful of people know on this quiet late-fall night:

“They’re saying there’s something in the sky.”

And we were always a curious people.

The Vast of Night opens with an eerie bar of music. We see that it’s coming from a small mid-century black-and-white television set. The show on air is called “The Vast of Night,” a production of the Twilight Zone-esque, Paradox Theater.

In the opening scene, a man tells a neighbor from his porch that he’s off to the high school game. It’s the late-1950s — Cayuga, New Mexico.

We follow a lanky teenager with glasses from a fizzling black-and-white square into anamorphic color, as he walks into the high school gymnasium, the house lights flickering. He chain-smokes coolly and talks fast, charismatic, and confident in his cardigan and glasses.

“It was a squirrel chewed right through the wire the last time this happened,” the old lady at the high school tells him.

The kid is Everett. He works for the radio station. Everybody seems to know him. They think he can fix the wiring.

He can’t.

But he’s the kind of kid who comes to the rescue.

Fay (Sierra McCormick), a high school trumpet player and “science girl,” interrupts Everett on his way out. She wants his help with her new tape recorder — high-tech stuff. She’s sort of intimidated by it.

Everett and Fay talk as they walk together to their evening jobs. They start out experimenting with Fay’s new tech by interviewing families at their car windows, and spectators about to enter the gym for the game. Everyone has their take on the last time this happened. It was a chipmunk. It was a squirrel. And other gossip. Every character in this movie feels fully formed immediately.

In a town like this, everyone knows everyone. I grew up (and still live) in a town sort of like this, a town where anybody of any count is probably at the football game or basketball game on a Friday night.

Everett and Fay are filmed in low-tracking shots, long takes, arriving at their destination after what amounts to walking the town square. The filmmakers offer us a slow sense of geography – the lay of the land. We will need this later.

The teenagers spend much of their walk wondering. Fay is obsessed with reading about inventions of the future. The script allows them space to rapid-fire a dialogue about a distant future with self-driving cars and “tiny TV phones” and through that, we get to see ourselves as dreamers from the past.

One could count on no more than two hands the number of cuts in the first two-thirds of this film. Events seem to be unfolding in real time.

Once separated – Everett in the radio booth, Fay at the switchboard – each master of their modern jobs, the two cross paths again. Fay hears a sound, out-of-place, alarming, a low thrumming like an engine rumbling, plus some eerie white noise coming through the radio, Everett’s station.

The same sound has invaded one of the phone lines. Fay sends it to Everett, who records it and puts it over the air, maybe the odd couple of listeners out there know the sound. We are a curious people after all, and we have the technology to help us solve mysteries, large and small.

They do get a couple of calls. People have heard that sound before. And a few people are seeing things too, something in the sky.

Everyone else is at a basketball game.

The Vast of Night is a tremendous labor of love by first-time director, Andrew Patterson, who financed the film entirely himself from money he made producing promotional material for the Oklahoma City Thunder.

He took no credit in name for any aspect of this film, though he and his film became festival darlings in 2019. He registered the screenplay with the pseudonym James Montague, a name also credited as a producer. He also edited the film himself under the name Junius Tully.

The film’s titles contain no director credit at all.

In a June 2020 interview for Indiewire, he stated, “I prefer the privacy of just being able to live and create without having to explain myself.”

Dig.

His vision of 1950s New Mexico, black-and-white, UFOs — the stuff of classic B-movie dreams – was informed by the research of co-writer Craig W. Sanger, who dove headlong into the inner workings and capabilities of 1950s tape recorders, switchboards, and radio.

Together, they worked up a screenplay that could use technology to economize a complicated story: a close encounter film told in clips of radio broadcasts, phone calls, and running, biking, or driving the same lonely town square of a small town Friday night at various speeds.

At one point, the camera takes us the distance between Fay and Everett, Patterson and his director of photography, Miguel Littin-Mintz, speed us through time and space with the camera itself with a four-and-a-half minute oner. I timed it during this last rewatch. It is astounding.

However, this film, while visually stunning, moving even, is largely about sound — one specific sound that people keep hearing or have heard in the past. Is it terrestrial or alien? The curious must know.

But it also echoes that in its masterful uses of sound itself. Waves, hums, lo-fi period TV themes, a score of soft guitar and piano, and strings to intense chase music. We hear all the zips, clicks, and rings of the switchboard, the static twists of radio dials, the rattling of reel-to-reel tapes, and even long expositional monologues over the phone, over the air, moving us towards a short but energetic final act with a humdinger of an ending.

On the way to the finale, Fay and Everett become curious audiences of the yarns of two elders of their hometown, leaving them to ponder the question of many a work of sci-fi: Are we alone in the universe? And what are the powers that be hiding?

What has been covered up? The disappearance of a kid long ago? Is this the Russians on a spy mission? Are these aliens? People in the sky? Are they communicating? Is it malevolent? Has this happened before?

This has all been done before, but not like this — the skill in its making puts it far above most films on these themes.

Patterson is not only playing with the 1950s B-movie vibe but also running through an experience of the best of American cinema, offering a visual acumen in the vein of Spielberg’s early sci-fi but with the energetic, ingenious flair of the Coen Brothers in the Sonnenfield years.

In the end, The Vast of Night remains adrift in the streaming realm. It dropped at a few drive-in movie theaters and then on Amazon Prime at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in May of 2020.

I have only ever talked to one person who has seen it — another movie nerd like me.

Fortunately for all of us, Patterson has his sophomore effort in post-production. The film stars Matthew McConaughey and Kurt Russell.

Upon seeing it for the first time back in 2020, I remember thinking about how much my Dad would have loved this movie. We lost him in 2016, and I miss how he wondered.

He is the reason I love science fiction movies like this one.

Here is what I wrote that day:

Of all the things I’m glad my Dad missed in this rotten year, I lament the fact that he missed this, a 1950s close encounter yarn in real time about two of the most interesting and lovable movie characters of the year, the teenage night switchboard operator, Fay, and late-night radio host, Everett. Their story of that “something in the sky” is the wonderment that drives my love of cinema.

I hope everyone who has not yet seen this film will please see it at the earliest opportunity. It is just too clever and engaging and full of such lived-in performances to miss.

Join us over here with the curious people, furious with our modern technology, proclaiming:

“If there’s something in the sky, I wanna know.”