“Night Always Comes” is a movie that will make nearly everyone feel seen, in the most uncomfortable way.
Vanessa Kirby plays the heroine Lynette, who shares a little house in Portland with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her only brother, Kenny (Zach Robin Gottsagen), a thirty-something who has Down syndrome and can’t live alone. The story spans 24 hectic and often perilous hours in Lynette’s life. The owner is selling the house that Lynette, Doreen, and Kenny have been renting. Lynette is determined to buy the house so they don’t have to move again. But she has no money and bad credit, so her mom will have to co-sign the deed and provide a $25,000 down payment.
Doreen missed the meeting because she saw a “Mazda madness” sale on the way and decided to spend the down payment on a new vehicle instead, to “do something nice for myself for a change.” Lynette is warned by the homeowner’s representative (his son!) that she can still have the house if she can raise $25,000 by the following morning. But if she fails, he will sell the place to someone else.
Over the next day, Lynette visits every person in Portland that she can think of who might have $25,000 on hand and be willing to part with it on short notice. Every stop on her journey tells us more about her. One thing we can see immediately is that she has an amazing amount of energy and endurance, but is so overextended that she’s doing everything chaotically and often badly. Lynette has part-time jobs at a bread factory, where she seems to be doing well, and as a bar waitress, where she’s constantly reprimanded for being late. She’s also taking a college course in economics, and we see her getting in trouble with the professor for bringing Kenny to class. (Lynette tells the prof that her brother is “between facilities,” in such a way that we wonder if she’s telling the whole truth.)
She’s also doing sex work on the side. The first step in raising the money is to call one of her regular clients (Randall Park) for a last-minute rendezvous; he laughs in her face when she asks for $25,000, but gives her the usual fee for her time, plus a little extra. Then she visits her former roommate, Gloria (Julia Fox). She’s the sidepiece of a local politician and lives in his swanky downtown apartment. Lynette once loaned Gloria $4000 years ago when she was in a crisis, and says she needs to be repaid immediately. Gloria gives a list of weak, frankly insulting justifications for not giving her the money, then lets Lynette stay there to watch for a package that she’s expecting. This, of course, offers Lynette the means, motive, and opportunity to abscond with a freestanding safe in the master bedroom closet, which she assumes contains her money. Things get wilder and worse from there.
Written by Sarah Conradt from Willy Vlautin’s novel, and directed by Benjamin Caron (who helmed episodes of “Andor,” “The Crown,” and “Skins”), this is a downbeat, harrowingly tense film about poor people who live every day at their breaking point, working themselves to death on behalf an economy would barely notice if they died.
It’s beautifully constructed and executed, with a lead character who reveals new biographical and emotional layers to us with each new scene, and a backup cast stocked with small-scale underworld types. There’s a scowling, swaggering drug dealer named Henry (Curtis McGann) who has a living room full of strung-out young women and a garage full of power tools; a soft-spoken ex-lover named Tommy (Michael Kelly of “House of Cards”) who is nested at the center of her traumas; and a pimp named Blake (a slimy, genuinely menacing performance by horror director Eli Roth). Finally, there’s Lynette’s bar coworker Cody (Stephan James of “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Piano Lesson”), who tries to help her open the safe and becomes her partner-in-crime for most of the night.
This could have been a contrived and even cartoonish movie. Still, it always errs on the side of believability, recounting a series of encounters so frightening and/or violent that people who experienced them would think about them every day for the rest of their lives. However, that might not be considered important enough to warrant a local TV news story or even a police investigation.
One of the many too-real touches in the script is Cody asking Lynette twice why she pegged him as somebody with underworld knowledge despite barely having spoken to him. The obvious answer is that he’s a young Black man with a stern demeanor, and there are hints that this is at least part of what Lynette, a slender, tattooed, blonde white woman, was thinking as she reached out to him. But a deeper answer is provided later in the movie: Cody once got in serious trouble with the law because a woman asked him for help. It’s quite possible that Lynette has been in a similar situation before and has developed a sixth sense for individuals like Cody. The whole script is this efficient and suggestive.
This description makes the movie sound like a hardboiled and violent crime thriller, or an older film noir about a woman who uses her wits and wiles, and sometimes her body, to achieve a goal or escape a bad situation. It has elements of both kinds of movies, plus a lot of the “cinema as heart attack” films, as represented by the Safdie Brothers’ “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time.” But in its heart, it’s more of a 1970s-style character study, about a person who has one foot in the criminal world and the other in the straight world. She can never leave the criminal world behind because it’s full of people who will help her when she gets in trouble, if they get something in return.
Kirby seems a little too upper-middle-class in demeanor in some of the early scenes, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that this is a mask she puts on when she’s existing in “civilized” spaces. She’s excellent in all of the particulars of the role, particularly in scenes where Lynette keeps suppressing and suppressing her anger until she just can’t hold it in anymore. When Lynette navigates overwhelmingly male-coded, often dangerous spaces, we get to see how a woman can achieve what she wants in such environments. (Cody’s in, but he’s never all-in.) The movie gives you a strong sense of the values that are prized in this world, which makes ungodly amounts of money by selling bodies, and drugs to put into bodies, and constantly looking for ways to take advantage of poor women, especially when they’re most in need of help.
Her psychology is complex, and parts of it are believably at odds with each other. By the time we reach the end of the movie, we’ve learned a great deal about what drives her, including a few details and observations that alter our perspective on Lynette, but there is still much more that we don’t know. Instead of leaving us to decide the usual movie binary of “I liked her/I didn’t like her,” we come away with a deeper understanding of her and the world she tries so hard to leave behind. “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,” the Bard wrote. “Good and ill together.”
