Night Always Comes review – Vanessa Kirby gets lost in poverty thriller | Drama films

There’s been a recent overkill of stories told about the super-rich, glossy films and shows set in ostentatious houses filled with characters as superficially on trend as they are painfully out of touch. It felt like needed escapism as we crawled out of the very worst of the pandemic, with The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu and Glass Onion all hitting a sweet spot, but it’s grown rather tiring, as Sirens, The Better Sister and Your Friends and Neighbors have felt less eat the rich and more what if we just admired their kitchens instead.

It’s become especially uninteresting as the gap between the uber-wealthy and the rest of us has widened, food prices up and empathy down. That particular anger pulses through Night Always Comes, a well-intentioned yet often inert Netflix drama based on the 2021 novel by Willy Vlautin. It’s told over one awful day, following a desperate, raggedly fatigued woman living on the breadline who must resort to extreme measures to save her family home. It’s reminiscent of the Dardennes’ similarly fraught, ticking clock parable Two Days, One Night or 2021’s underseen Full Time, which turned the day-to-day stresses of an overloaded single mother into a seat-edge thriller.

It’s notable that these stories tend to emerge within European cinema (the recent German drama Late Shift fits alongside, following an overworked nurse at breaking point), where social-realist stories have found a place less occupied in the US. Perhaps that’s why Night Always Comes, while set in and around Portland, Oregon, is made by a British film-maker and led by a British actor, both from a country of artists more comfortable raging against the machine.

Director Benjamin Caron, who found small-screen success with episodes of The Crown and Andor, already tackled the wealth divide in his first film, the sleek and twisty con artist thriller Sharper. His primary objective there had been to entertain us (which he achieved, quite spectacularly) but his grimmer follow-up is tasked with a more serious message, an almost two-hour descent into the hellish reality of Lynette, a woman driven to the edge by the direness of her circumstances. He’s reunited with his Crown star Vanessa Kirby, a recent Marvel inductee, who had previously shown an impressive fearlessness when pushed close to the edge in the otherwise rather affected Pieces of a Woman. Her determination is persuasive here but the mechanics of the plot less so, forcing her into an episodic series of increasingly less involving and believable situations as she tries to secure $25,000 for the house that’s about to be taken away from her family.

Lynette’s after-dark quest sees her try to get money owed by an old friend (Julia Fox), revisit a shadowy figure from her past (Michael Kelly), get mixed up in a drug deal with a slimy coke hound (Eli Roth), beg for help from an ex-convict co-worker (Stephan James) and return to sex work with a client (Randall Park). The chain of events is kicked off by her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) suddenly spending the original $25,000 on a new car, an act so impossibly cruel that the film can’t quite find a way to explain it.

Lynette is quick-tempered, confrontational and maddeningly impulsive and it’s refreshingly unpatronising that the script, from the Mothers’ Instinct writer Sarah Conradt, doesn’t spend time trying to soften her hard edges. But her desperation shifts too quickly into reckless foolishness and when the pace slows down to allow some more texture to her character, Conradt’s only way of doing this is upping the trauma from her backstory. Caron mostly avoids accusations of poverty porn – his direction is propulsive and then restrained in the right moments – but Lynette is written as only being the product of the very worst things that have happened to her and by the end the overwhelming bleakness of her story starts to feel numbing.

Night Always Comes tries to be both seat-edge action thriller and searing social issue drama and while Caron is able to squeeze suspense out of the early, frenetic moments, there’s not enough emotional weight to the more human final act. It might be glumly of the moment and it’s never a bad thing for a tech giant like Netflix to fund films about those grappling with the hopelessness of an impossible system but noble intentions aren’t enough to save this one.

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