

They decide to figure out what is going on.Īll of this is familiar territory to anyone who has seen "The Blob," " The X-Files," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "The Twilight Zone," you name it. Fay and Everett are both technology nerds. A woman calls the switchboard, screaming through the static about something weird going on on the outskirts of town. A weird sound comes through the line, a sound Fay doesn't recognize. There's interference in the radio signals. Once ensconced at their jobs, they realize something strange is going on. He hosts a nightly radio show, and she mans the town switchboard.

Two high school kids, Everett ( Jake Horowitz) and Fay ( Sierra McCormick), leave the game and walk across the deserted town to their nighttime jobs.

Cheerleaders do cartwheels on the sidelines. The film opens at a high school basketball game. With "The Vast of Night," it really is about the how, not just the "what happens." How on earth Patterson made a movie about a UFO hovering over a small town in the late 1950s without falling back on every cliche in the book is the fun and wonder of "The Vast of Night." You already know the plot. What is out there in the vast of night? There's something in the sky. The line is whispered into an eerie nighttime silence, and the mood is one of awe, terror, excitement. Something about Patterson's approach-precise and inventive-makes a moment that could have been a cliche into something fresh, vivid, filled with the strangeness of what it would really be like. It's a testament to what director Andrew Patterson has pulled off in his micro-budget sci-fi indie "The Vast of Night" that when that line comes, it feels like it's the first time those words have ever been said, even though there's a line just like it in every movie of its kind.
