By Night's End

Review by Brittany

A small-budget home invasion film, By Night’s End combines elements of suspense, drama, and crime to tell the story of a married couple who must overcome their inner demons in order to survive a challenging night of being terrorized.

Despite being a rather small production, the movie comes off as one of the more well-made indies and it’s clear that a lot of care and energy went into this project. I was impressed by the choreography of the (too-few) hand-to-hand fight sequences, some of the more interesting moments of camerawork, and by the high performance level of the cast.

Unfortunately, it’s not all sunshine and roses. The writing is often clumsy. The poor actors do their best, but can’t quite sell, some overly melodramatic moments of “tragic backstory” that mostly feel shoe-horned in. There were a few other missteps in here that could have been fixed with another set, or two, or three, of eyes looking over the screenplay. An outside editorial hand could have fixed a lot of the problems in writing, but some things, including the couple seemingly knowing nothing about crime scene forensics despite everyone in the country being about 20 years into a cultural obsession with true crime and shows like CSI, NCIS, Bones, and Forensic Files, are probably unfixable and needed to undergo a slight re-write.

I wanted to praise the story for twisting the expectation a bit and having the homestead protector as the female lead instead of the man, but then I felt the dialogue undercut that message by repeatedly poking at the man as being “soft” and weak. I’d rather the movie just forgo commenting on it at all, and present us with a reality where people don’t care about the gender of the person holding (or not holding, as the case may be) a gun to their head- but maybe that’s just me.

Overall, it’s a well-made movie, but that can’t quite save it from the mistake of having only one pair of hands in charge of writing, direction, AND editing. It is a shame, because with a bit of a re-imagining of character motivations/behavior, and a few tweaks to plot points, this could really be something interesting. As it stands, I would rate it mediocre, but still pleasantly surprising, thanks to good technical aspects.

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BY NIGHT’S END

Directed By Walker Whited

Staring Michelle Rose, Michael Aaron Milligan, Kurt Yue

By Night’s End will be released by DarkCoast Worldwide on Digital platforms October 6.

Thanks to DarkCoast for Prerelease screening access to make this review possible

Listen to Kenny and Austen’s full podcast, Oct 6.