A Night Like This (2025) Movie Review: A Hollow Stroll Through Indie Rom-Com Clichés

An issue I see plaguing a lot of recent indie films lately is the unwillingness to allow the setting to be a character. Proper use of setting can be instrumental to successful storytelling. It can add so much more character, texture, and depth to everything. However, in A Night Like This (2025), London is barely even set dressing.

Our leads walk around well-known parts of central London, such as Waterloo, Southbank etc etc, The Shard looms in the background of a few scenes, and we see them take public transport, but that’s all. Its depiction of London is overly romantic and incredibly hollow. It’s nothing more than a mediocre postcard approximation of a city. The film could’ve taken place anywhere in the world, and it would be the same.

There is an alarming lack of life in the bustling city. It’s oddly quiet and sparse, one of the busiest places on earth rendered so empty, creating such a counterproductive unease in the film. London is one of the most diverse places in the world, and it’s a huge part of what makes it unique. Which makes the choice to populate nearly every frame with white faces feel starkly at odds with the true, diverse fabric of London. “A Night Like This” is the feature debut of filmmaker Liam Calvert.

The story is quite simple: Lukas, a down-on-his-luck actor, and Oliver, a privileged wannabe musician, end up crossing paths on a cold winter night. They decide to spend the next eight hours with each other, strolling around London. In an effort to better understand what the point of it all is. It’s an incredibly familiar tale with a lot of potential for compelling characters, drama, and filmmaking. Yet in almost every element, the film ends up ringing as something quite hollow and borderline uncanny.

The film’s most glaring flaw is that it’s built on a crumbling foundation—its screenplay. It’s a story you’ve watched countless times before, yet here it stands out only for the ways it falters. The script from Diego Scerrati indulges in almost every trope possible, never trying to subvert or challenge the cliches it presents. As with most rom-coms, the moment our two leads meet, we know how it’s going to end. However, with films like this, it’s about the journey. In this case, our journey is dull and monotonous.

The script doesn’t know how to communicate to its audience what is going on without just outright saying it. Almost every character trait, piece of backstory, and moment of conflict brings the film to a halt as we watch our two leads awkwardly dump exposition onto each other.

Our tortured, sad leading men feel like an amalgamation of rom-com and indie drama stereotypes underbaked into flimsy one-note archetypes. Stuffed to bursting with “tragic backstories,” the script lumbers through themes of mental health, abuse, death, and even an awkward stab at post-Brexit anxiety. It plays like a slow march down a checklist of modern indie clichés, each box dutifully ticked in turn.

A Night Like This (2025) — A still from “A Night Like This” (2025)

It’s all so predictable and unadventurous. Throughout the story, our leads come across a couple of side characters, such as a grumpy music venue owner played by David Bradley and a rowdy Liverpoolian homeless teenager played by Jimmy Ericson. These two characters again have a lot of potential that just feels unrealised; they do exactly what you expect and then vanish. Scerrati’s script struggles to dig deeper or try anything new, nor does the film really utilize any of the possibilities of London as a backdrop.

This lack of texture to the setting and characters, unfortunately, extends itself onto the film’s form and performances. A film built on a faulty foundation can only do so much, and sadly, actors Alexander Lincoln (Oliver) and Jack Brett Anderson (Lukas) struggle to turn in compelling performances.

The incredibly awkward dialogue causes the chemistry and performances to never really feel organic. The main thought that crosses one’s mind during a lot of the film is that “nobody talks like this,” almost bordering on satire or parody. The set and production design suffer from this same sterile artifice embedded into the film’s foundation. Partly due to budgetary restraints, the interior locations feel so much like constructed sets and are lit in a way to hide the lack of decorations. These rooms just feel like odd voids that feel as lived-in as an Ikea show bedroom.

The cinematography plays it incredibly safe; almost every scene is shot in the same way, gentle handheld with shallow focus and what feels like the exact same lighting setup for 90% of the film. A romantic film that feels so cold and delirious, almost as if it is at odds with itself. Even as our characters warm up to each other, the film never does. There is no attempt at establishing a visual language to try to enrich the story being told.

Overall, “A Night Like This” ends up providing its audience with a generic, almost paint-by-numbers attempt at an indie rom-com, poorly executing every predictable stereotype you can imagine and creating a very dull portrait of London. While the filmmaking is a cut above the script, it still isn’t enough to make the experience memorable in any meaningful way.