Night Always Comes

Vanessa Kirby has an impressive track record of oscillating between big action fare and demanding emotional drama. When she’s not pulling off complex and thrilling fight choreography in the Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious franchises (not to mention her first steps into the MCU), she’s baring all in a fraught, lengthy birthing sequence in Pieces Of A Woman.

Night Always Comes feels like a conscious throwback to Kirby’s more pared-back projects, with the actor leading this scuzzy nocturnal thriller. Directed by Benjamin Caron (Andor, The Crown), the film is set predominantly over a single night in a Pacific Northwest neighbourhood. After being let down by her unpredictable mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and with the threat of being separated from her disabled brother looming, Lynette goes to increasingly extreme lengths to try and save her home.

What should be a frenzied and propulsive ride, however, is underserved by a heavy-handed and often reductive screenplay. Adapted from a Willy Vlautin crime novel, Lynette’s dire situation is introduced via an extensive audio montage of news coverage which builds up a hopeless portrait of working-class America. This damning set-up should be enough to justify the plight of our impoverished lead, but instead the waters are further muddied by her bafflingly selfish mom and flashbacks to a traumatic adolescence that’s led her to sex work, all of which is handled either clumsily or with little nuance.

Where these narrative knife-twists are set up to shock, they not only fall short but distract from Kirby’s performance. At the points where it does reach its full potential, the actor makes Lynette unapologetically abrasive and forthright, allowing mere flashes of vulnerability before skidding into her next perilous predicament. Her well-tuned physical capabilities also make for some gripping, gritty action scenes, of which you’ll wish there were more. Instead, the material fails to match the conviction of its star and makes you hope that, like the night, another role of this calibre inevitably lies in wait.