When Kath and her boyfriend arrive at a remote cabin in the redwoods, they find a mysterious younger couple already there. Her boyfriend disappears with the young woman, and Kath becomes obsessed with finding an explanation.
“Gone in the Night” is a film that is supremely confident in its mystery. Director and co-writer Eli Horowitz might believe they’ve really tapped into something culturally relevant. While it may have some tenuous connections to ageism and the fear of one’s own mortality, it works much better in the early run when it’s just a search for closure. That search begins after Kath (Winona Ryder) and Max (John Gallagher Jr.) go away for the weekend to an Airbnb in the foggy hills of the woods outside San Francisco. When they arrive, their reservation appears mixed up with another couple’s, the visibly agitated Al (Owen Teague) and his much more inviting girlfriend Greta (Brianne Tju). After a night of playing an erotic board game, Kath wakes up to a distraught Al, who tells her their significant others have run off together.
“Night” knows there’s an age difference between Gallagher and Ryder, though it’s not necessarily as severe as the movie suggests. Gallagher has a youthful presence and is the kind of man-child who still muses about Jamiroquai on vinyl. Ryder has much better chemistry with the cabin’s owner Barlow (Dermot Mulroney), a former tech genius with a rare blood disease that left the business world for simpler things. He’s difficult not to like, introduced haggling with an angry customer in Ryder’s florist shop. There’s a lot of fun to be had when the two begin their amateur sleuthing as they make a charming, unlikely pair.
Of course, there’s something much more sinister at the heart of “Night,” which initially played SXSW under the more fitting title “Cow,” as it’s revealed through flashbacks that the cabin weekend was a set-up – though for who and what remains unclear until the final act. Nice nod to “Salem’s Lot” sans vampires as the reveal is; it doesn’t work. The characters aren’t fleshed out enough to have any emotional impact, rendering the experience a little clinical. Conversations about generational divides start to feel less authentic and more like the script’s excuse rather than a legitimate cause. At the very least, it introduces the idea of a Ryder/Mulroney buddy cop spinoff, which would be far more entertaining.
Available on VOD August 3rd
