Taglines: The Night it never end.
The Night movie storyline. After a night out with friends, an exhausted married couple, Babak (Shahab Hosseini), Neda (Niousha Noor) and their baby take shelter in the grand, but eerie Hotel Normandie. Throughout a seemingly endless night, mysterious disturbances ruin their night’s rest as Babak and Neda soon realize they’re locked-in with a malevolent force that hungers for the dark secrets they’ve kept from one another.
With The Night, director Kourosh Ahari made history for being the first U.S.-produced film to receive a license for theatrical release in Iran since the revolution. The psychological thriller follows in the footsteps of The Shining, luring viewers into a hotel that is both ominous and inviting, where the ghosts of the past still linger around each corner. The terrors that linger in the corridors are more real and terrifying than any movie monster in a mask. The Night will make you never want to spend a night away from home again.
The Night (Persian: آن شب, lit. ’That Night’) is a 2020 psychological horror-thriller film directed by Kourosh Ahari in his directorial debut. It is a co-production between Iran and the United States, starring Shahab Hosseini, Niousha Noor, Leah Oganyan, and George Maguire. The film centers on an Iranian couple living in the United States, who are imprisoned in a Los Angeles hotel.
The film had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on January 20, 2020. It was released in the United States on January 29, 2021, by IFC Midnight, and in Iran on February 24, 2021, by Mammoth Pictures and Ayat Film Company. It received positive reviews from critics.
Film Review for The Night
he fundamental creepiness of hotels is the driving force behind this very potent supernatural mystery-thriller from Iranian-American film-maker Kourosh Ahari: the creepiness of their deserted corridors, their stately or shabby lobbies, and their anonymous rooms, whose blankness keeps the secret of their previous occupants.
It’s a creepiness that predates and is independent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, though that’s admittedly an influence here. In modern-day Los Angeles, a young Iranian couple with a baby – Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Noor) – are at a dinner party with friends in an unfamiliar part of town.
They are tired and quarrelsome on the way home; Babak is really too drunk to drive, and Neda has lost her licence after an earlier run-in with a traffic cop, so they grumpily decide to check in to the nearest hotel. This turns out to be the Hotel Normandie (perhaps calling it “Hotel California” would have been too on-the-nose). The sinister receptionist of this odd establishment (George Maguire) tells them he only has a suite available: irritable and impatient, Babak takes it.
So it is extremely disturbing for them to discover that they are in fact the hotel’s only guests, which moreover leaves them unable to explain the sudden heartstopping thumps on the door and the children crying for their mummy outside their room. Are they being haunted by some awful presence in the hotel, or by the festering secrets and lies in their own relationship?
All these are ingredients for the kind of scary movie that’s usually a terrible cliche, and to be fair, there’s nothing obviously new about The Night. But it is put together with great style, force and visual imagination, and Ahari deftly uses the couple’s baby to ratchet up the tension. Uniformed authority figures, initially disturbing or intimidating, suddenly profess themselves to be entranced by the baby and ask if they may hold her – and somehow the couple can’t find a polite way of saying no. It delivers a clammy shiver of disquiet.
The Night (2021)
Directed by: Kourosh Ahari
Starring: Shahab Hosseini, Niousha Noor, Leah Oganyan, George Maguire, Michael Graham, Armin Amiri, Elester Latham, Kathreen Khavari, Gia Mora, Alain Ali Washnevsky, Steph Martinez
Screenplay by: Kourosh Ahari, Milad Jarmooz
Production Design by: Jennifer Dehghan
Cinematography by: Maz Makhani
Film Editing by: Kourosh Ahari
Costume Design by: Maryam Rasekh
Art Direction by: Gerin del Carmen
Music by: Nima Fakhrara
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: IFC Midnight
Release Date: January 29, 2021
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