Vanessa Kirby is one of the most interesting contemporary British actresses with an unstoppable flow of a go-getting glow. Whatever she does, she is on top of the game.
Night Always Comes on Netflix casts her as the economically challenged Lynette, trying to save her home and family from imminent eviction, but encountering severe roadblocks as she negotiates one night of horror, crime, and monstrous memories of a past that she would rather forget.
The writing (by Sarah Conradt) is progressively powered by Lynette’s pluckiness. Her attempts to get the money to buy her family out of eviction range range from the strange to the deranged. You know what they say about desperate situations.
At times, Lynette’s night of monstrous misadventures feels too hightide. There is this particularly far-fetched interlude where Lynette steals a safe full of cash from a friend’s home, convinces an accomplice to help her get it open with the help of a safecracker who turns out to be more than what Lynette had imagined.
In pursuit of surprising us by constantly catching the protagonist unawares, the screenplay tends to slip off the track. But the director Benjamin Caron never allows the shaky chunks to pull the proceedings down. We are constantly clamped into attentiveness by Lynette’s resourceful ways of courting danger, acute danger.
From befriending a felon Cody (Stephan James) to running into an old exploitative flame Tommy (Michael Kelly), Lynette’s night out is no carnival.
Night Always Comes adopts the one-night-of-crazy-adventures format of Sudhir Mishra’s Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin and the very recent Tamil film Good Day. This means most of the film is silhouetted against dark shadows and lurking dangers.
Not that the film revels in unwarranted suspense or jumpcuts. Vanessa Kirby’s Lynette refuses to play the victim card. Sure, she is in dire need of funds. But she is not a damsel in distress. Some of the most delectable incidents in the plot are those where Lynette outwits her adversary.
The one escapade that I enjoyed the most was when Lynette steals her client Scott (Randall Park)’s car after having paid sex with him. The Mercedes comes in handy later, though, like everything else in Lynette’s life, it too betrays her eventually.
It is not ethically correct to describe Night Always Comes as entertaining. It is somewhat like misery porn to enjoy Lynette’s desperate adventures. We may describe it as a guilty pleasure. But the film is decidedly riveting. The camera (Damián García) creeps into places in Lynette’s heart where normally it cannot reach.
To describe Vanessa Kirby’s performance as sensational would, again, be an injustice. She is way too encrypted into her character to be tagged separately. After watching her as a protective mom in Fantastic Four, it is a joy to see Kirby as a protective sister in Night Always Comes. Outwardly, she doesn’t convey a nurturing quality. But give her a solid crisis to deal with, and watch her cope.
