“Night Always Comes” (2025) is the feature film debut of director Benjamin Carson, a veteran of international television, whose credits include standout episodes of “Andor,” “Sherlock,” “The Crown,” and “Wallander.” Although television was once thought of as a secondary medium, advances in the “prestige” era have shown that the more interesting, nuanced stories for adult audiences are usually told on the small screen, where franchise worldbuilding and award season fanfare don’t complicate the purity of intentions.
Carson is certainly a professional, as “Night Always Comes” has impressive production details, strong performances from A-listers, and a fervent sense of kineticism. It would be hard to find all these within the directorial debut of a less seasoned member of the industry.
Unfortunately, television is also a medium in which filmmakers are assigned to work within an established aesthetic, where they are given stylization notes from showrunners, writers, and production heads that have an endgame in mind.
When left to create a world from scratch, Carson is forced to use the narrative inspiration of ‘70s films that he’s clearly drawn from, and then graft them onto an overstuffed contemporary thriller that deals with modern class and intersectionality conversations. Perhaps the shakiness of the auteurism would have been forgivable had “Night Always Come” been more engaging, but the film sadly undercuts itself through a series of dull set pieces that come to iterate on the same point.
“Night Always Comes” follows the young woman Lynette (Vanessa Kirby), who is forced to work several jobs in order to provide for her drug-addicted mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen). Although Lynette is facing eviction, she has found a potential new living arrangement for her shaky family unit, given that her mother will provide for a portion of the funding. However, the relationship between Doreen and Lynette has never been particularly respectful, leading to an unexpected setback in the plan. Doreen decides to buy a new car, forcing Lynette to spend a wild night trying to make up the cash that she owes.
The gritty “all-in-one-night” thriller is a time-honed subgenre of crime fiction, with classics such as “Dog Day Afternoon,” “High Noon,” “Collateral,” “The Warriors,” and “Assault on Precinct 13” all standing out as prominent examples. Unfortunately, the parameters of Lynette’s plight often feel forced on the film for narrative reasons that break with the authenticity that it is so clearly striving for.
It was believable that Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett would be forced to deal with multiple unsettling characters in “After Hours” because Martin Scorsese created a slightly surrealist, anxiety-driven nightmare about the male ego. Comparatively, Lynette is forced to go to such elaborate lengths in order to meet her deadline that it’s hard to determine how many of her decisions are reactive.
The other issue that “Night Always Comes” faces in comparison to these other classics is the unambiguous ethics of the situation. Part of the joy of a recent favorite like “Good Time” (which curiously cast Jason Leigh in a nearly identical role) is that the film reveled in the fact that Robert Pattinson’s Connie Nikas was a sociopathic individual whose depravity is revealed throughout the escalating stakes, making his insurmountable challenge a darkly amusing rollercoaster ride.
Comparatively, “Night Always Comes” paints Lynette as a character with almost a superficial amount of empathy, and places her in a world where she can only encounter truly monstrous individuals who would seek to take advantage of her.
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“Night Always Comes” does attempt to wrestle with the grim reality that Lynette may not have been equipped to handle her responsibilities towards the very end, but it’s always painted as a tragedy, as the film isn’t nearly willing enough to engage with her flaws. Although Kirby does her best to give a gritty, burdened performance, it does little to elevate a fundamental misjudgment of the character. It doesn’t help that Lynette often hints at experiences that don’t seem to congeal with her decisions. The film asks the viewer to take leaps of logic when explaining what skills Lynette would or wouldn’t have, based on her upbringing.
Even if “Night Always Comes” was an earnest attempt to examine class relationships, it ultimately stokes the “divide” more than it generates “empathy.” The film suggests that because of her compassion, hardworking mindset, and professionalism, Lynette does not “deserve” to be an impoverished individual, but is forced to sacrifice a supposedly normal life in order to care for her family.
The film ultimately treats the impoverished as “others,” and offers flimsy attempts at examining the complex ethics of living on the edge. When multiple supposed allies end up double-crossing Lynette at inopportune moments, the film unfortunately seems to incorporate the conservative scare tactics that it may have intended to subvert.
The one truly great aspect of the film is the remarkable performance by Gottsagen, in his second major role after his brilliant debut in the 2019 independent dramedy “The Peanut Butter Falcon.” That film cast him as a young man with Down’s Syndrome attempting to fulfill his dream of meeting his favorite professional wrestler, and “Night Always Comes” casts him as a similarly idealistic character who is unexpectedly placed in a complex, confusing situation. Although they are too few and far between, the moments of Lynette and Kenny bonding are the highlight of the film, as the chemistry between Gottsagen and Kirby is pure and believable.
The rest of the cast leaves something to be desired, as the decision to put recognizable faces in critical roles makes each macro sequence a little more predictable, and further buries any attempts to feel like an authentic representation of fringe culture. Although Stephan James’ performance as Lynette’s enigmatic coworker fares better than the shady businessman played by Randall Park and Eli Roth’s shift criminal, the characters all feel a bit too larger-than-life for a film that is trying to evoke real issues.
“Night Always Comes” clearly has a lot on its mind, which may be to its detriment. In attempting to examine broken homes, economic stratification, the treatment of the mentally ill people, rape culture, and legal loopholes, “Night Always Comes” feels like an amalgamation of hot-button issues that doesn’t have the nuance to critically unpack any of them. Perhaps a film like this was never intended to be enjoyable in a traditional sense, but “Night Always Comes” is simply unpleasant.
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