‘Late Night with the Devil’ Review
Midnight horror.
NOMINALLY A FOUND FOOTAGE FILM (more on that in a moment), Late Night with the Devil follows the 1977 final broadcast of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a Tonight Show competitor that can’t quite get over the Johnny Carson hump. A brief montage sets the stage: We see how Delroy (David Dastmalchian) got the show, how even the tragic final interview with his cancer-stricken wife can’t get him to the top of the Nielsens, and how he hoped what we’re about to watch—an on-air demonic possession of a little girl—would be the thing that finally dethroned Johnny.
What follows is a combination of the “master tapes” from that broadcast combined with “behind-the-scenes footage”: In other words, we see the show as it aired initially plus what was happening during the commercial breaks, as on The Larry Sanders Show. The TV footage is staged like a late-night show, shot in color, displayed in full frame, and the film stock resembles the fuzziness of video; the background stuff is shot in black and white, with sharper film, and blocked like a narrative feature. We cut seamlessly between the two at the commercial breaks, learning, for instance, that a psychic who had appeared earlier on the show has died while being transported to a hospital following a bout of Exorcist-style vomiting on the air.
This framing device is the one real misstep writers-directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes make: By positioning this as a found footage picture rather than, you know, just a movie with a voice-of-God narrator that jumps between on-air horror and behind-the-scenes wrangling, the Cairnes Brothers ask the audience to wonder how, precisely, all this perfectly framed footage of Delroy and his team came into existence. To really do the “found footage” thing you’d need an excuse for the behind-the-scenes sequences to have been filmed. Perhaps the professional skeptic Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss) has a film crew rolling footage in an effort to sniff out tricks perpetrated by parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her possessed ward, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli). It’s never established.
Mind you, this isn’t enough for me to tell you to skip Late Night with the Devil, which features a near-perfect mixture of existential dread and expertly timed jump-scares. And maybe it all works anyway, as the breakdown of point of view and the melding of objective and subjective reality becomes a key component of the film’s final moments.
While Late Night with the Devil has a handful of great practical gags—the one involving worms is the sort of thing you aren’t likely to forget—the picture as a whole is a great example of an absolute truth: the best special effect is an actor delivering a surprisingly great performance.
Granted, it wasn’t a huge surprise to those of us who have watched Dastmalchian emerge as a key player in Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve’s films: he alternates between a twitchy intensity that demands attention (The Dark Knight, Prisoners) and a recessive personality that creeps back into the shadows, watching like a malevolent spirit (Oppenheimer, Dune). But Dastmalchian’s work here as Delroy hits an extra gear. He’s asked to do four different things—affable late-night host; conniving behind-the-scenes macher; grief-stricken husband; over-his-head striver—and he perfectly nails each of them. The supple brilliance of his performance is another reason why I think the montage at the beginning is a bit of a misstep: Dastmalchian imbues Delroy with a lived-in quality that immediately humanizes him, renders him realistic. We can pick up on the tragedy in his background and the moral sacrifices he may be willing to make without having them spoon-fed to us.
Late Night with the Devil is on 1,000 or so screens now; it hits the horror streaming service Shudder on April 19. Watch it with a crowd if you can.