La noche siempre llega

6. Stars.

Something about this film is off. At times I found myself counting the minutes until it was over, and that's never a good sign. At other times it was riveting enough to capture my curiosity. On the other hand, it's so overdone a plot these days, same story I've seen so many times. It's about a woman who temporarily mis-places her sense of right and wrong, because her sole focus is on avoiding eviction and losing her Down Syndrome brother to the system.

This actress is iconic and her acting in this is good, but the movie is bad.

Her mom is a deadbeat, and wow is that actress soooooo good at playing a loser. I've seen the actress play the bum before, but this takes the cake. What little screen time the mother has, she really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

So back to the story. Our protagonist is having a lot of difficulties making ends meet, we are shown her true colors in that she's a high class "working girl", balancing two other jobs, one at a bar and one in a factory; and even with her extraordinary good looks, she is still not able to make ends meet. And yet, as we watch her swindle her way through the night, and then spiral deeper and deeper into some really dangerous and highly illegal activities (we are talking hard-core prison time), you'd think it would be a fun ride...nevertheless, this film fundamentally fails to entertain.

Totally watchable, even if a bit cliched. Acting is pretty good, especially Vanessa Kirby, but writing is mediocre, bordering on unbelievable. Still, the rating is too low and deserves to be higher. Cinematography is good. There are gaps in the plot, not sure why. We have a tradition of bad Friday night movies, but this was surprisingly entertaining.

This is a dramatic thriller that is well done but is deeply unsettling. It is the story of a troubled family, featuring Vanessa Kirby as a struggling girl that is looking to protect her developmentally disabled brother. Her Mom, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is an even more troubled and the family stands to lose their home. This leads to the series of dramatic and thrilling events that place the life and safety of the characters in danger. The film is well acted and well filmed. The strength, beside the acting, is Direction and cinematography. It is dark and foreboding. The cast is great. I didn't;t love it and it made me feel like crap but it is well done.

I really wanted to like this film. Kirby is fantastic. Unfortunately, the plot makes no sense.

In what world is a person about to be evicted looking to make a down payment on a house? This comes off as a story about poor people written by someone who's never been poor.

She couldn't make a $1500 rent payment, but she's screwed if she doesn't make a $25,000 deposit on a house... wouldn't it make more sense to just pay her rent and not get evicted?

It's too bad, because if not for this glaringly jarring plot flaw the movie might have been ok.

Not gonna lie, the plot progression resembles Good Time a lot more than I could anticipate, but I was also engaged the whole time, thanks to a very solid, believable showing from Vanessa Kirby. Her eyes do a lot of the talking in certain scenes, and I would never complain about the number of back shots we get of hers (..yeah, she's got a great BACK..uff!). For director Benjamin Caron, this is a slightly better effort than Sharper, more so because the events can be tied to real middle-class happenings.

I liked the conversations that the central characters keep having, showcasing sufficient detail without resorting to gimmicks like flashbacks or cutaways. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zack Gottsagen, and Stephan James offer good support to Kirby, balancing out the plot absurdities with some level of grounded stability. I'll award this 3 stars, as this story was never meant to give you the quintessential happy ending, and it doesn't. It just concludes at a detour, and we're left to write the rest of the story ourselves. Maybe.. just maybe, it would've helped knowing Kirby's character a bit more BEFORE we jumped into the "timebound thriller" part of the plot.