Film Review: Late Night with the Devil (2023)
Shudder/IFC Films
Period piece films are a challenge for many viewers. They come with regular intrusive reminders that what is playing out before us is a reconstruction: our eyes seek the loose wire, the rogue Air Pod, the Starbucks cup. They feature modern actors using modern language to create a passable imitation of a historic episode that doesn’t quite sit with the vigilant mind. Many of these efforts realistically lack the budget or expertise necessary to effectively reconstruct the time and place where the story is set, but that doesn’t mean the stories shouldn’t be told.
Late Night with the Devil succeeds far more than most of of its ready comparables, telling a dark tale about the fictional never-before-seen filming of a late night show’s final episode. While this not an unfamiliar setup for a horror film, Late Night does an exemplary job of creating the illusion that we’re going back to a broadcast television set on Halloween night in 1977, when hardluck variety show host Jack Delroy and his show Night Owls will roll tape for what will ultimately be their final outing. By the end of the filming, the stage will be an abattoir, the audience fled and traumatized, and Jack himself primed to be the subject of decades-long speculation.
Quietus on the Set
Late Night with the Devil pitches as an unaired recording of the final episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and also-ran variety show from the 1970s. In the fictional setting, Delroy is a fallen star, now buried three-quarters of the way down the Nielsen ratings in some tomb beneath Johnny Caron’s actual shadow, and Jack is quietly reimagining his drain-circling late night show as something that pushes boundaries, inviting on sensational guests and testing the censors when it comes to appropriateness. It’s Halloween, and Jack is ready for his moonshot, having put together an occult-themed episode featuring a psychic, a skeptic, and a parapsychologist physician whose fates and motivations will interweave throughout the final broadcast.
The film is fast out of the blocks, whipping through Jack Delroy’s and Night Owl’s consequential history and bringing the viewer to the unaired footage itself. It’s effectively paced, and while the style of the cuts and commentary are modern, it carries an air of the era, and avoids hinting at the specifics of the disaster that will result as the night goes on. The costumes, acting, and script are all sharp and believable, and, for what it’s aiming to do, Late Night feels like a near-perfect film at the opening salvo. David Dastmalchian brings his trademark lowkey intensity to a cast of uniformly strong performances, and by the time we’re on air, the audience knows all that they need to. It’s excellent scriptwriting, and primes the viewer to have a good time.
Kicking off with an opening monologue that hits on many key sociopolitical touchstones of the period–the flagging Carter Administration, the gas crisis, and more occult-referential topics, Jack Delroy feels like a very believable footnote in the silver age of late night television. The story moves on to his first guest, a cold-reading psychic, Christou, who pumps the audience for vague details about lost loved ones to demonstrate his power. Only at the end of his act, Christou feels a final presence with painful insistence, and it’s the first note of discord in what will be an increasingly disastrous production. What follows is a magician-scientist set about disproving the existence of the paranormal, and–most controversially–the author, parapsychologist, and caretaker of the teenage survivor of a LaVeyan cult who perished a decade earlier in conflict with authorities.
Everything Transitory is But an Image
While the film is always signaling where it is headed and doesn’t really depart from that course–it’s going to hell in a handbasket and there’s not a damned thing either Delroy or his guests can do about it–but it doesn’t rush. The episode continues after Christou’s outburst, and the creepy stuff stays in the shadows for a time, letting the story breath with frequent commercial breaks and backstage conversations about the peripheral happenings around the set. It’s very patient, not being too obvious that anything is really wrong, and if you came to Late Night with the Devil without knowing it was a horror film, you could plausibly believe at this point that what you were watching was something else at this point in the film.
As an aside, I really appreciated the amount of effort the scriptwriter(s) put in to place the film in the era. There are many, many mentions and allusions that tie the work to both the sociopolitical climate of the time and occult elements which came to prominence in that era (e.g. Ed and Lorraine Warren, Bohemian Grove, popularity of hypnotism, etc.), and the significance of these may be lost on a general audience.
For its fairly modest aims, it’s a near perfect film right up until the final chapter, rolling out a steadily increasing level of tension while doing some generally original and creative setpieces that ratchet up the strangeness without becoming corny. The final chapter itself goes a bit off the rails, mishmashing some familiar (but nonetheless, well-executed) demonic elements, I think this is something viewers can overlook on the whole. The final act is not as good was what proceeded it, but such high standards are difficult to maintain throughout.
Final Thoughts
Late Night with the Devil delivers exactly what horror fans want from such a film: a serious-but-fun script that is equally scary and entertaining, coupled with genuinely top-tier performances. David Dastmalchian and Ingrid Torelli deserve special attention in this regard, but the entire cast turns in an excellent and immersive performance. Simply put, we need more horror filmmakers to put this amount of care into the craft of their films. Late Night with the Devil tells you exactly what is plans to do and does it well. If you’re content with a safe story that will be enjoyable, if not memorable, buy a ticket.
Verdict: 7.8
Strengths:
Strong script, performances, and execution
Patient, creepy build that features some great storytelling
Transports the audience to a variety show set in 1977 effectively
Weaknesses
Ending feels a bit muddled, and isn’t quite as strong as the road that got us there
No real surprises
You might also like: IMMORTALITY, V/H/S Series, Planet Terror, Deathproof
