Direction: Kourosh Ahari
Country: USA
The third feature from Iranian director Kourosh Ahari, The Night, is a psychological thriller impregnated with ghosts that slowly plunges the viewer into its nightmarish scenario. The story, written by Ahari and Milad Jarmooz, lives uniquely from the mood and plays with something that no one is indifferent nowadays - being trapped with no control at all from a particularly unpleasant situation.
In this case, an Iranian man (Shahab Hosseini, a regular in Asghar Farhadi’s films) living in the US for some time becomes prisoner of ghostly forces in a Los Angeles hotel together with his recently arrived wife (Niousha Noor) and baby daughter. The energy that surrounds them is adverse, starting with a displaced man (Elester Latham) who repeats unintelligible phrases, a sinister receptionist (George Maguire) who disturbs with his conversation, graceless presences as well as baffling disappearances and pranks. Heavily contributing to the atmosphere, the details do matter in the development of the story, but they also convey a sense of messiness in the way they are mounted.
The visuals, not being particularly artful, are adequate, while the symbology linked to some sort of curse along with the necessity to extract the hidden truth from the Naderi family, play key factors here. Still, the film results more formulaic than twisted, and the minimally unsettling situations that occur in a blink of an eye are powerless to prevent it from sinking into the shadows of oblivion.
As a curiosity, this is the first American-made film to receive permission to be screened in Iran since 1979.
