Gone in the Night

It begins with a decent build up, buy slowly decends into absurdity. At the end, there is no end...no real dramatic resolution...it just ends and you wonder why you watched this. Just plain bad.

Ryder may not have signed up for an award-winner in this one, but if you can hang on to the plot line long enough - it's a good kind of crazy turny. When her and her boyfriend show up at an Airbnb and find a couple already there, the backstory starts to play.

I somewhat invariably hold the opinion that feature-length films should be released in cinemas. With that being said, I have no problem with a movie so poorly conceived going straight to VOD, as I have to imagine the typical viewer would have left the theater feeling as if their time and money had been wasted. The performances range from average to below average, and although the writer's ending was anything but safe, the last act was so outrageously overwrought that I found myself audibly laughing at the surprise "a-ha" moment. All of the suspense and intrigue that had been building up to that point evaporated in an instant. When mystery films are done right, they feel plausible, but occupy a space slightly outside of reality; when they're done wrong, you get a movie like Gone in the Night.

This is a fun little movie. It's not the most clever mystery, but it's interesting enough that it didn't overstay its welcome (and I say that as someone who mostly figured it out fairly early). The flashback structure is hit or miss, sometimes giving you enough to make you more intrigued, and sometimes dispelling the tension it's already built. I knew absolutely nothing about the movie before I saw it, and I left happy to have seen it. It's nothing you'll be talking about weeks later, but it's an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes.

I like movies that keep you guessing until the very end and make me go WTF I never saw that coming. This is not one of those. Had this one figured out early on yet I kept hoping there would be a twist to prove me wrong. Nope. Come on, Winona Ryder, you can do better than this! Not much else very noteworthy to say about this movie but they don't like short and sweet reviews here so will keep typing until I meet the minimum character limit and that's not easy to do and it reminds me of trying to write a one page essay for school by using lots of filler words so let's just say I was very very disappointed.