Night Always Comes

Grade: B-

Night Always Comes is the most difficult-to-remember title I’ve come across in years. This is on the other side of the spectrum from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Silver Linings Playbook. I had trouble keeping those names straight because they were so wordy and unique. The problem with calling it Night Always Comes (I originally typed Night Always Falls) is that it’s so ordinary and generic, doing nothing to evoke the plot, tone, or memory of seeing the movie. It’s somehow appropriate, as the film is your run-of-the-mill Netflix Original, going through the motions once again. However, there’s enough to make it work, as a one-and-done.

It’s in quasi-real time, like 24, taking place over the course of one night. Times are displayed periodically, to let us know when it is, with the last digit flipping to the next minute. That’s cute the first time it happens, and would have been amusing as a random one-off, but it does that 100% of the time. Vanessa Kirby plays Lynette, who lives with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen, from The Peanut Butter Falcon), who has special needs. The house isn’t the greatest in the Portland suburbs, but it’s Lynette’s childhood home, and therefore rife with memories.

Lynette is trying to keep it. On the day she and Doreen have an appointment at the bank to sign and secure it, Doreen doesn’t show up. She used that money to impulsively buy herself a new car. They are given one last chance to both arrive at the bank the next morning with the money, which Lynette assures them will happen. The movie is an all-night race against the clock to make $25,000 by morning.

I’ve joked before that Vanessa Kirby should do a light breezy romcom. When she’s not dabbling in popular action franchises (The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) or lengthy historical dramas (Napoleon), the projects she chooses tend to be dark heavy weighty dramas, like The Son and Pieces of a Woman. I’ve been saying that she’s earned a cinematic vacay. Do a screwball comedy on the beach or something! Night Always Comes is no different. In the midst of the desperate measures she takes to raise this money, Kirby as Lynette is forced to revisit some unsavory times from her past. As her brother, 40-year-old Zack Gottsagen, who has Down Syndrome in real life, grounds the movie with the most sincerity and heart you’ll see here. As much as I love Kirby and Leigh, they do so much acting, and I never caught Gottsagen acting. What a tangled web Lynette weaves throughout the night, and I chuckled at an exterior shot of the house near the end of the film. I thought: “She went through all that to keep THIS house?”

In the last part of the third act, the movie loses the taut, efficient, interesting thriller it often was, and devolves into silly monologuing about finding yourself and the like. It doesn’t sufficiently earn the character study it attempts to be. It’s messy, heavy, and derivative, but Night Always Comes (got it right on the first try this time) ultimately has enough in the tank for me to recommend it a little bit – but I doubt I’ll still be thinking about it a week later. In a film with Vanessa Kirby and Jennifer Jason Leigh, it’s Zack Gottsagen who steals the show. I came for Kirby, and stayed for Gottsagen.

Grade: C+, that flips up to B-