DUBAI: In “Night Always Comes,” British director Benjamin Caron and British star (and producer) Vanessa Kirby attempt a gritty look at the lengths to which the ever-increasing wealth gap in the US can force those on the wrong side of the gap to go. Part-suspense thriller, part-social-realist diatribe, the film (written by Sarah Conradt) seems fueled by genuine anger and good intentions. Whether that’s enough to justify you actually watching it… well, maybe.
Kirby plays Lynette, a young woman with a trouble past holding down multiple jobs (including working at a bakery and being an escort) and trying to secure the finances to ensure that her childhood home, where she lives with her nightmare narcissist mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who has Down syndrome. As the film begins, she has 24 hours to get the required down payment of $25,000 to the landlord — cash that she believes she and her mother have squirreled away. Then Doreen turns up in a new car. Guess how much it cost? Yep. As a spur to get the plot moving, this works. But it’s an act so malicious that it undermines the film’s later attempts to explore the mother-daughter relationship in a more-balanced way and to suggest that Doreen isn’t all bad.
Terrified that she — and, particularly, Kenny — will be out on the streets the next day, Lynette throws herself into increasingly desperate attempts to secure the necessary funds by 9 a.m. These attempts include ripping off an old friend; returning to sex work and asking her rich client to “invest” in the property; stealing the rich client’s car when he refuses; and trying to sell some stolen/found cocaine. Kirby is compelling (which is just as well, as she’s in literally every scene of the film’s almost-two hours), and the decision to make Lynette a genuinely complex, multi-faceted, confrontational and not entirely likeable woman is a welcome one. But each step of the way, her actions become increasingly reckless and dumb, and harder to believe. And as the grim revelations about Lynette’s traumatic past pile up, the tension — impressively stoked for the first 45 minutes or so — actually drops because the film becomes formulaic.
There’s plenty to admire here — the believable sibling chemistry between Gottsagen and Kirby, for example — and Leigh, one of her generation’s finest actors, is excellent. But, as a whole, “Night Always Comes” is trying to be too many things, and ends up being great at none of them.
