Late Night With The Devil

Late Night with The Devil

Writers and Directors ~ Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

2023, Australia - United Arab Emirates

Stars ~ David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss

 

With this kind of horror premise, there’s only one likely way it will go. And it does, so it is the journey and the execution that counts. Instead of the trending Eighties homage, Cameron and Colin Cairnes go to the Seventies for an era of talk show TV and Satanism. There’s plenty of Seventies aesthetic but played straight instead of kitsch; although it becomes evident quickly that the live and “backstage footage” doesn’t hold up, being too evidently clear and edited for maximum effect to be convincing. And then there’s the disappointment/outrage at AI usage for the transition cards, which at the very least seems lazy. Long before the denouement, the film has jettisoned and kind of “found footage” credulity pinned by the opening narration (Michael Ironside!) summarising a tumultuous decade and the never-quite-making-it career of our central show host. It becomes apparent that any demand for sincerity or continuity as found footage is shrugged off whenever it needs to, even before and especially when we get to the worms. ‘Ghostwatch’ it isn’t. It sets up and then breaks its own rules. If you can’t make allowances for such shrugs, enjoyment will be crimped.

 

 

But what it does have is pleasureable period detail, a little satire on backstage melodrama and fame,‘The Exorcist’ and theremin gags and, mostly, David Dastmalchian. Dastmalchian manages to convey subtlety in a role that could have been just showboating and/or obnoxious in a context where he is always on show. When someone says he’s a good guy, it’s easy to believe that he is misguided rather than egotistic. Everyone projects layers of real characters underneath the televised veneer, even hammy clairvoyant Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), for a broad-strokes producer, Josh Quong Tart (Leo Fiskewhen); and we get to the apparently possessed girl, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), she’s obviously doing the Creepy Kid thing from the outset, talking like someone half her age, that there is nowhere for her to go. It all escalates into a few shocks and reality breakdown which jettison once and for all the TV format pretence.

 

It's true that this has mostly been heavily guided by gripes about internal logic, but with ‘100 Bloody Acres’, the Cairnes brothers made it clear they are out to offer fun and extremity in equal measure, and there’s plenty in ‘Late Night with the Devil’ so that any shortcomings don’t stop the enjoyment. They know how to serve up a most entertaining horror concoction.