The Vast of Night

In a small town on the night of a basketball game, a switchboard operator picks up a strange audio frequency, and she and the local DJ spend the evening tracing it, interviewing callers, and edging toward something in the sky.

Andrew Patterson made his debut for a reported few hundred thousand dollars and it does not show: it is a technical marvel, built from long, unbroken takes, including one that races across the whole empty town in a single shot, and it plays as an episode of a Twilight Zone-style anthology.

The film is mostly people talking, on the phone and in cars, and the tension is entirely in the voices and the patient camera.

It is science-fiction horror in the Close Encounters mould, elegiac rather than frightening, and its faith in dialogue and atmosphere over spectacle is the whole point.

A stunning calling-card film.