One of the reasons Vanessa Kirby is such an odd fit in the new Fantastic Four movie is her ability to convey danger. Her piercing, watchful eyes seem like they should work well accompanying a character with otherworldly powers, but her Sue Storm is so narrowly conceived, in such pragmatic and protective terms, that Kirby’s usual gravity seems oddly weightless.
That’s not a problem with Night Always Comes, her new starring vehicle for Netflix, debuting Aug. 15. She still has that slightly stultified version of an American accent, but here she plays Lynette, a woman who somewhat improbably has about 18 hours to scrape together $25,000 to secure her family’s future. Despite her slight aloofness, Kirby is well-cast as a woman who will do nearly anything to help her family survive (which her superhero movie reduced to her underdramatized powers). Her opacity ensures that it’s hard to read just how far she’ll go.
It’s equally hard to get a read on the movie. Night Always Comes first approaches its material as a heavy-handed kitchen-sink drama, the soundtrack blaring with news reports talking about the dire economic straits so many Americans find themselves in—one unexpected expense away from financial ruin, and so on. Lynette seems to be constantly heading off that ruin, working multiple jobs, though other characters murmur about her inability to hold any of them down for very long.
Presented with an unlikely opportunity to buy the shabby little house where she lives with her seemingly unemployed mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her developmentally disabled older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen from The Peanut Butter Falcon), she prepares a $25,000 down payment. Then, instead of meeting her at the bank, her mom blows the money on a new car. Determined to not let this indifference cost her the family home, Lynette embarks upon a desperate mission to raise another 25 large by her last-ditch 9 am deadline.
This involves hitting up the rich guy (Randall Park) with whom she still dabbles in sex work; an old friend (Julia Fox) with more rich-guy connections; and a co-worker (Stephan James) who might be able to help offload some stolen goods. Eli Roth also shows up. It’s certainly an eclectic cast.
The one-wild-night structure coupled with Lynette’s desperation recalls the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, with Robert Pattinson in similarly sticky circumstances. As much as those Safdie pressure cookers seem highly unlikely to work out for their protagonists, they’re able to generate moment-to-moment suspense with jittery determination.
Night Always Comes, by contrast, carries its glum economic-hardship baggage even as it moves into more patently absurd territory. The movie almost doesn’t seem to buy into its own urgency, which strands Kirby as the only one driving any action. Everyone else is just performing different degrees of unpleasant naysaying.
That’s particularly true of Leigh, who isn’t in the movie much but doesn’t need a lot of screentime to come across as completely incoherent. First, she seems pathologically irresponsible and passive-aggressive, rousing herself off the couch only to waste $25,000 with the petulant insistence that it’s her money.
Late in the movie, she’s suddenly able to call out Lynette’s faults like she’s a screenwriter explaining the dramatic catharsis we’re supposed to experience. The shift seems designed to open our eyes to what we may have missed through our investment in Lynette’s goal. Instead, it feels like the movie has withheld some information for an empty gotcha, which it almost immediately softens.
Lynette gets so much backstory that the movie loses track of her present tense. (There’s no sense of whether Lynette has been trying to help her family for the past year, or the past decade, and little indication of her apparently volcanic inability to hold down a job.)
So is this a story of moral ambiguity or just wishy-washy writing? Probably the latter, but it takes a while to reveal itself because this is a good-looking movie. Director Benjamin Caron is a streaming veteran of late; he’s directed episodes of Andor, as well as the (pretty good!) Apple TV+ feature Sharper. He has a strong, striking compositional sense that deserves a bigger screen.
In Night Always Comes, he repeatedly holds on wider shots of Kirby within her environment, so the viewer gets a strong sense of place and atmosphere before cutting in closer. He seems to understand that the after-hours questing has a seedy allure—even if the movie keeps making ludicrous gestures toward heightening, like how seemingly every car ride features squealing-tire peel-outs.
Kirby must respond to material like this; there was some of that amped-up energy in her Oscar-nominated Pieces of a Woman, too. Night Always Comes has a similar mix of natural interest and overheated grandstanding, applied to pulpier ends.
After a few got-the-money-no-wait reversals, you may still want Lynette to escape economic and physical danger. Mostly, though, you’re rooting for Kirby to light out for a movie that treats her with the proper respect, fear, awe, whatever—just something that better reflects her distinctive vibe.
