Metacritic reviews

Patterson trusts that chemistry will compensate for a gentle thriller that chooses to impress with ingenuity and charm instead of special effects.

How on earth Patterson made a movie about a UFO hovering over a small town in the late 1950s without falling back on every cliche in the book is the fun and wonder of The Vast of Night. You already know the plot. You've seen it all before. But the way the story is told is new. With The Vast of Night, it really is about the how, not just the "what happens."

While it nods to everything from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Patterson’s movie is more a tribute to the romance of a breeze-whispered sprawling night and the shivery thrill of not knowing what nameless threats it hides.

Using long takes, tracking shots, segments where the screen goes pitch-black, and rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue, Patterson has created a film that forces an audience to pay attention for fear of missing something.

It’s impressive to see such sophisticated camera work from a newcomer. But to combine that with experimental narrative and sound techniques, and place it in a detailed mid-century modern environment, and to have all these ambitious gambits (mostly) work, all on an independent film budget...well, it’s quite the feat.

Like the characters that are drawn to the peculiar sound and dark sky on that fateful evening, The Vast of Night is a film that lures the audience’s attention to the screen and will leave you wanting more films from Patterson down the road.

It’s less Close Encounters of the Third Kind and more like a special episode of The Twilight Zone, starring The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. Which is to say, pretty fun.

Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.

By turns intriguingly odd and frustratingly obscure, this is confidently quirky material that nonetheless boasts superior production values with style to spare.

That said, it works, sucking you into its “vast night” and taking us all back to an innocent time where the future was endless possibilities, “radio” was how a small town kid punched his “ticket out of here,” and TV took you to “another dimension…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”