It follows an Iranian couple with a young baby, and it starts out innocently enough at a dinner party. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and after the party ends, the family drives home like they would any other night. But this isn't any other night. For some reason, their GPS bugs out on them, and after a few hours of driving around, they give up and decide to spend the night at a hotel. Immediately after they arrive, they begin to experience some strange phenomena, and when you see it, you're not entirely sure what to make of it. At first, most of what happens seems weird but still explicable by natural means, but then the movie starts leaning more heavily into tropes that are very typical of supernatural horror. For example, the characters begin to hear strange noises, and they see some creepy kids running around the hotel.
Soon enough, the supernatural element becomes impossible to deny, and you realize that you're watching an intriguing mix between a stereotypical supernatural horror movie and a psychological thriller. Like I said before, it's a combination you don't see too much, but it works really well here. The film blends both subgenres pretty seamlessly, making for an eerily effective mystery that keeps you guessing the whole way through.
And that's the biggest strength of The Night. In fact, it's just about the film's only strength. The plot is almost non-existent (it's literally just about this family in the hotel), and the characters are just barely fleshed out enough to support the story, but it totally works. The scares and the mystery are so good that you don't really notice the movie's shortcomings.
In particular, this film really shines because the supernatural force in the hotel isn't just trying to scare its victims. More than anything else, it's messing with their heads, and that sets the movie apart from the rest of the supernatural horror pack. This thing is trying to disorient the couple and strike at their deepest emotional vulnerabilities, so the film eschews elaborate, in-your-face scares and flashy monsters that come out and smack you over the head with how terrifying they are.
Instead, the creepy scenes in this one are much more subtle. They're more about unsettling you and inducing a pervasive feeling of dread than they are about creating individual scare moments (although the film definitely has those too). Each time something spooky happens, it helps to build the overall atmosphere of terror and confusion, and it all adds up to a mysterious and unnerving whole that's much more satisfying than a bunch of loosely connected jump scares.
All that being said, the movie does have one big flaw. The last twenty minutes or so get really weird, and I thought it went a bit too far in that direction. It almost feels like you're watching a completely different movie, so it starts to become disconnected from what came before.
That's pretty much the movie's only real weakness, so it's not enough to derail the entire thing. On the whole, The Night is still a very effective and creepy supernatural thriller that keeps you guessing from start to finish. It messes with both its characters' and its viewers' heads, creating an intriguing mashup that combines the best elements of the psychological and supernatural subgenres. I'm very happy to report that this is the first good horror movie of 2021, so if you've been itching to finally see something new that won't leave you disappointed when the credits roll, I highly recommend checking this one out.
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