In many ways the opening shot of The Vast of Night encapsulates everything we need to know about the film. A slow zoom towards a retro 1950s television tuned into a Twilight Zone-like sci-fi series named ‘Paradox Theater’. The TV set sits in a room filled with similarly mismatched furniture. Is this the present day? Is the ancient television some hipster affectation? Empty chairs sit toward the sides of the frame. They don’t face the television, but rather each other, primed for conversation between family and friends. This is a film, not about the visual spectacle and potential excess of the sci-fi genre akin to so much contemporary cinema, but about the simple love and craft of its storytelling and the debate and conversation it provokes. We’re invited to take a seat in this domestic space and get comfortable before the story unfolds. 

The artifice of storytelling, particularly within the fantasy genre, is made clear to us from this opening use of mise-en-scene. The retro television set’s screen – which will ultimately fill the frame of our own screen, the flickering black and white blending into HD blues and oranges – orients us to the unfolding story as a narrative within a narrative, a cheap and schlocky television show within an independent film of modest means. ‘You are now entering a realm between clandestine and forgotten’, the show’s narrator intones. ‘A slipstream caught between channels… found only on a frequency caught between logic and myth’. We are watching a film which is showing us a television show, one that we will repeatedly slip in and out from like a daydream. The television show introduces a story of small-town Americana, government conspiracy, and War of the Worlds inflected UFO paranoia. Yet the B-movie/exploitation trappings of the genre suggested by the opening of ‘Paradox Theater’, the few black and white snippets of the ‘show’ as it was ‘broadcast’, and the history of garish 1950s alien-invasion classics that inform its thinking, is not carried over to the widescreen colour version into which it dissolves. Multiple and compounding layers of narrative mediation and framing are instead offered to us as a viewer. 

This will not be a film which indulges in visual excess and CGI-laden effects. This isn’t Independence Day. In fact, director Andrew Patterson primarily tells his story through dialogue and sound, or the absence of such elements. In many ways the aural-centric focus of the storytelling mimics the ‘background noise’ aesthetic of mid-century television. Our two main protagonists – Fay and Everett – are radio presenters/journalists. Despite their small town life and lack of worldly experience, the film’s lengthy opening exchange between the two characters finds Everett teaching Fay how to go out and find a story, and then how to tell it. Prompted by strange sounds interfering with telephone and radio equipment, Everett in his role as local radio DJ asks people to call in with any information that may be relevant. We hear from Billy (never seen), an army veteran who tells us that the sound is identical to one heard during an unsettling experience from his military days. Prompted by more investigation, Everett and Fay visit the home of Mabel Blanche, who shares her story of an alien encounter which again resembles what seems to be happening in the present. 

We have transitioned again, this time to an aural account, within an imagined television show, within a film. Each occasion of storytelling is left largely without cinematic embellishment, focusing almost exclusively upon the sound and cadence of these voices as they offer their perspective on events. Like Everett and Fay as they hit the record button on their tape deck, we sit listening, rapt with attention – probing, evaluating, cataloging every detail, no matter how small, in the hope that it may explain what’s happening. The storytellers’ voices are more often than not, hushed and whispered. We have to lean in closer, remain all the more silent and still. We’re still sitting around the retro television set, taking pleasure in the wonder and awe of the tale. Like all great science-fiction, these moments prompt question after question, speculation upon speculation, both from us as viewers and from our two wannabe reporters. Maybe we ask the person next to us, ‘what would you do in this situation? How would you react?’ And then at moments we withdraw: from Billy or Mabel’s story; from Fay or Everett’s recounting of these accounts, from the episode of ‘Paradox Theater’ itself. Transitioning between these viewpoints we come to recognise and admire the masterful craft of sci-fi storytelling, performed and interpreted from many different angles, each adding to the tapestry of the world being presented. The genre and the storytelling may be wrapped in cliche, punctuated by moments which test our ability to suspend our disbelief. But that’s part of the fun.

‘You are entering Paradox Theater’.