Mile-a-minute dialogue and showy unbroken tracking shots make this enjoyable 1950s-set mystery a worthy homage to The Twilight Zone
This witty and audacious sci-fi mystery arrives like a persistent and unexplained radar-bleep from the heavens: low-budget, high-concept. First-time director Andrew Patterson and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W Sanger have created something like a movie pastiche or a filmic chamber opera – one that will sometimes spend ages in cramped interior locations while people give long speeches to each other, and sometimes whoosh around outside, with enjoyable, show-offy unbroken tracking shots that take us through dark streets, up to a high school and through its crowded gymnasium.
It’s set in the 1950s in the fictional town of Cayuga, New
Mexico – no one actually says the word “Roswell” – where people are coming to see a high-school
basketball match. Everett (Jake Horowitz) is the smart-alec local DJ who is putting out his nightly show at the same time, but arranging for the basketball commentary to be tape-recorded so he can transmit it the next day: locals just love to hear their kids’ names on the air. His friend Fay (Sierra McCormick) is the telephone exchange operator, wearing those Larson-cartoon cat-eye glasses, who alerts him to some very strange sounds echoing and crackling through the ether, playing havoc with her phone calls. She records it on her own reel-to-reel device and Everett puts it on the air, asking if any listener can identify it. The result takes Everett and Fay to a terrible situation on an exposed hillside, gazing up into what the title archaically calls the “vast of night” – which contains more than they thought.