Late Night with the Devil (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Transporting us immediately to Halloween night, 1977, a documentary introduces us to a fourth national network (as opposed to the three that then aired) featuring its late night host Jack Delroy, whose variety talkshow Night Owls has never quite held a candle to the reigning king Johnny Carson. It's sweeps week, and Jack and his greedy producers are desperate for major Nielsen ratings so they can finally put a jewel in their crown after six seasons in Carson's shadow. To add flair and sensation to their usual Halloween-themed episode -- complete with audience costume parade -- they invite four paranormal-adjacent guests to appear live. First is Christou, a mentalist and likely charlatan. Second is Carmichael, a skeptic and debunker of seeming phenomena. Finally, bestselling parapsychologist June and her young ward and cast study Lilly, the only survivor of a cult's mass suicide who exhibits symptoms of demonic possession. We've got a great show for you tonight, folks!

The film presents itself as a documentary of sorts, setting up itself in a montage-like prologue that acclimates us to the setting and key figures, especially Jack Delroy, played by an incredible David Dastmalchian. While his dialogue is sometimes stilted and his jokes on the flat side, Dastmalchian injects his character with a nervous joy of showmanship that betrays what must have been a grueling character study of old television hosts. His every look and gesture feels calculated and pitch perfect for the period, and his somewhat slimy charm carries the whole film. I'd like to see him in more leading roles. Jack politely handles Christou (a too-brief but effective Fayssal Bazzi), whose antics don't quite work until he falls suddenly ill and vomits black sludge before being rushed to the hospital. It's left unexplained, and while Jack is clearly shaken, even he grins and bears it as good for his ratings.

Carmichael, on the other hand, is an insufferable pessimist, played to irritating perfection by Ian Bliss. His takedown of Christou and subsequent naysaying paints him as a curmudgeon more concerned with appearing in control than in actually considering the feelings or experiences of anyone around him. Again, it makes for great television, so Jack entertains his antics. There's a really fascinating scene, later in the film, when Carmichael attempts to disprove an earlier phenomenon by hypnotizing Gus (Rhys Auteri) and, secretly, the whole audience, then playing back the footage to prove mass delusion. It's a chilling sequence, suggesting in no small part our own complicity in making meaning from the spectacle, and one that features graphically upsetting imagery. But it also begs us to question, perhaps more than anywhere else in the film, the objective truth we're meant to be seeing, even on talk shows. 

Enter June and Lilly, the centerpiece of this Night Owls episode, fresh off the success of the former's book about the latter, Conversations with the Devil. Laura Gordon is stunning as June, beautifully dressed and clearly eager to make a splash on this TV special, and we find out later her that she and Jack are more than acquaintances, though it's never clear who initiated or why or to what exact ends. Meanwhile, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli, the runaway star of this film) is unnerving from the outset; too precocious and comfortable in a room full of expectant viewers, she immediately locks onto the camera and exudes a confidence beyond her years. Her unsettlingly deep voice wants to be heard, even before we know she's "psychically infested," as June says. Her demon, she shares with Jack, is "Mr. Wriggles," so named for the sensation of him moving around inside her. It's one of the most disturbing moments in the film -- which boasts more than a few -- and one I'll never quite unhear. It reminded me of Anthony Hopkins talking about "God's fingernail" scraping around inside him in The Rite.

I don't want to share much more about what happens in the film's final act -- mind you, it's all a fairly quick 90-ish minutes -- because experiencing it is what matters. Or not, because frankly, the finale didn't do much for me. But regardless of personal taste, the film earns its wackadoodle images and ideas. The Australian Cairnes brothers who wrote and directed this film clearly put hard work into this production and care about it a lot, as its production design and visual prowess indicate in almost every frame. I think their screenplay could have used considerably more workshopping, and I'll elucidate why, because in polishing what is already solid, we can learn a lot about comparatively small changes earlier on that might have strengthened the film's impact.

Were I to have made this movie, I'd have axed the prologue. It's a fairly lengthy setup that uses stock footage of the '70s to no dramatic effect, mostly reminding us of the hot topics of the decade and the general anxieties of American viewing audiences, from antiwar and racial protests to the beginnings of a Satanic panic. Worse, it uses thick exposition to paint a picture of our protagonist before we've met him and, in a grave misstep that nearly spoils the film, gives us an insight into exactly where all this is going: it outright tells us, not five minutes into the film, that Jack has frequented "The Grove," an exclusively male social club in California for rich and influential men, many of whom have found extraordinary success in business. Given the setting, the opening montage in pseudo-documentary style, and the genre, we'd guess it's a cult even without the video footage depicting it as such. Wouldn't it be more effective to skip this, throw us directly into the "lost episode" or whatever it is, and make us piece things together on our own? Everything spelled out in the prologue could easily and organically have fit in the present, especially in the behind-the-scenes B&W bits.

I also would have sliced significant parts of the climax to make things more ambiguous. Since the rising action, which is the body of the film, hinges on explicit suspension of disbelief -- and, indeed, is thematically all about arriving at empirical truth -- it would have been far more satisfying for the story to embrace its own uncertainty about the nature of truth, especially as filtered through television. Think of the ways The Exorcism of Emily Rose mastered its own manipulation of courtroom dramas and, more importantly, our expectations of courtroom dramas to literalize the central conflict that we can never be absolutely certain about potentially supernatural phenomena. Late Night would have done well to mine the rich specifics of bringing live television into the homes of "innocents" and the incredible influence this had back in the '70s. Moreover, by literalizing not only Lilly's possession but also the psychological torment Jack undergoes in the final stages of this apparent ritual, the movie saps its own enigmatic mystique along with its thematic power.

All in all, it's a hell of an original concept and a delightful movie. By eliminating the faux-documentary setup, we would have been spared the frustrations of its dubious "found footage" gimmick that here distracts from the raw excitement of live television of its period. Similarly, and in reference to the behind-the-scenes bits, there were a hell of a lot of commercial breaks in this television episode; even if it were meant to be an hour-and-a-half special, the number of breaks is staggering. And tightening up the climax to be more ambiguous (consider ending with a question of whether we were still hypnotized, or if Carmichael were part of the cult and covering up demonic influence, or other similar possibilities that open up once you cut the effects-heavy bloodbath) would have strengthened the film's explicit thematic concerns of truth through the tube. Then again, maybe cutting the entire subplot tying Jack to the Grove would have helped, and it would have been an easier adjustment, making him more innocent before having to finally choose between his soul and his ratings. But for production value and design, you can hardly do better, especially set as it is in the '70s as opposed to the much overused '80s nostalgia these days. And despite its missteps, I'll support novel, fresh filmmaking in a tired genre any day!