Review: Late Night with the Devil

It's proof of the strength of its concept that Late Night with the Devil works as well as it does. Recreating antique television is a tricky job, and this often manages to be a weird mix of on-the-money and slapdash at the very exact same time. Without a note-perfect performance from David Dastmalchian at its heart, this would be little more than an interesting (and creepy) experiment; he's what makes this movie soar even as the talk show within it goes wildly off the rails.

That winning concept is a episode of a late-70s late night talk show, supposedly taken direct from recently discovered master tapes, in which a very special theme night goes horribly wrong. But first there's a documentary-style prologue to get us up to speed on both the era's Satanic Panic and the path to not-quite-success taken by host Jack Delroy, quickly bringing us to the point where a Halloween special featuring psychics, debunkers, and a young girl raised to be a demonic sacrifice who just might be possessed herself seems like a ratings winner.

Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes do a great job with the look of the talk show. It's the kind of thing where you know there are probably flaws there somewhere, but it captures the overall vibe so well that you can forgive some dubious camera angles. But during the ad breaks we cut to "behind-the-scenes" black and white footage that doesn't make (technical) sense at all. It provides useful backstory and fills in some gaps, but it's basically shot like a modern film, the kind of footage they couldn't have taken at the time.

While these scenes are technically jarring, they do make sense (and work pretty well) if you forget all the "this was an actual event that happened" stuff and see this as a horror movie that just happens to take place in a television studio. Which is a reasonable way to look at things, even if it does impose a different set of limitations on the material. If you're not going to pretend it's a real episode of a real show, why bother filming 2/3rds of the film like it is?

Some of the other flaws are more understandable. Events come to a boil early on, followed by a stretch where not a lot overtly happens to further crank up the tension; the whole idea of putting in a big moment early on then letting the (boring) story play out for another half hour or more is so ingrained in current script writing that it's not so much a flaw as just another example of a trend.

But horror, more than any other genre in cinema today, remains one where film makers are encouraged to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks (before slowly sliding down, leaving a bloody trail behind). Audiences expect horror films to be an uneven collection of moments that work and scenes that fail; even slow-burn classics of the genre often have a couple of missteps we forgive them for.

Fortunately here, the good outweighs the bad. The fake show is convincing enough to provide a decent backdrop for the slow descent into nightmare, with just enough reversals to explain why people don't get the hell out of there (plus, as we're told multiple times, this is showbiz, and it's all part of the act). There's a nice variety of horror on display here as well, ranging from the creepy to the gory to the nastily brutal to a few surreal moments - though again, the enemy of terror is over-explanation, and this often spells things out that we already grasped through earlier insinuation.

There's one moment towards the end where the film shifts gears and a character finds themselves in a very different situation from everything that's come before. That "oh shit, they're really going there" realisation threatens to turn this from being merely pretty good into something truly special.

... and then they use that shift to fill in backstory rather than pile on the surreal horror. So close.

- Anthony Morris