Another Hole in the Head Film Festival Coverage
Red Night review.
Red Night will get attention for being an experimental film with no dialog. We should be talking about it as an effective and original slasher movie.
Festival movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Red Night
Directed by Beck Stafford and Collin Stafford
Written by Beck Stafford and Collin Stafford
Starring Adrienne Lauren, Kayla Aguila, Collin Stafford, Beck Stafford, Shelley Bloom and Tetiana Sklyarova
Red Night Review
I’m going to begin this review a bit differently than others. I’m just going to go ahead and copy and paste the synopsis for Red Night:
“Enter the colorful world of a queer chosen family of five monsters. These siblings are inseparable, always supporting each other and just trying to make it through each day. When Ash goes out on a quest of self-discovery, the group tries to muster on without them, but feel like they are missing a piece of themselves. In preparation for Ash’s return, the group decides to throw a surprise party. What was supposed to be a joyous reunion turns red when an evil being that was unleashed on Ash’s journey tags along. This being is fixated on isolating and killing each of the monsters one by one. Ash is determined to protect their family, fighting back against a seemingly infallible foe. A beautiful and twisted film with zero dialogue. A must see.”
I did that for two reasons. First…because I would be utterly incapable of explaining the plot of Red Night. And second…because once you see it all laid out like that…I think I kind of understood the movie the whole time. I may not have picked up on everything the synopsis says…but…yeah…I think I pretty much understood the movie while watching it. That may seem like a small accomplishment. The bare minimum a movie should strive for. But when I tell you the “monsters” the above summary talks about appear to be drapes with pillows for heads…or that they are incapable of speech…you’ll understand why some pride may be taken here.
Even if I didn’t quite understand what was happening throughout the entirety of Red Night, and certainly not as plainly as is outlined above, I very much enjoyed watching it. That’s because, despite the lack of dialog and the long sequences of pillow faced drapes dancing about and looking at each other…Red Night inevitably begins to communicate in a universal language. One that I, and if you’ve found this review…you, understand as well as we do our native tongues. Red Night, you see…is a slasher movie.
I’m not being reductive when I say that. My point isn’t that a beautiful but opaque experimental film is nothing more than a run of the mill bog standard slasher movie. It’s quite obviously more than that. It just happens to be a great slasher movie. As a slasher fanatic…perhaps I am simply latching onto the aspect of the story that I understood best…or, at least, spoke to me the most. Fine. It doesn’t change the point. Red Night is a great slasher movie.
The antagonist here is an equally silent, and completely nude human shaped male. That’s what I’m going with anyway. He arrives early in the story…after a long sequence that ends with one of the monsters taking a bath. The Smile (as the movie lists the emotionless, silent, human male shaped killer) enters and murders the monster. It’s like Psycho by way of Bed, Bath and Beyond. In fact, the entire movie eventually becomes the targeted murders of these “monsters”. And it’s tremendous.
The Smile is a seemingly unstoppable entity tearing the family apart. Literally…tearing them apart. It’s a gorgeously shot, colorful, completely unique way to tell a slasher story. It even gives us a final…um…monster. With a backstory connected to the killer. The final showdown is as good as almost anything you’ll see in a more straightforward slasher. Red Night, without so much as a syllable uttered, connects on a deeper emotional level than most.
I’d love to know the origins of this project. The choice to have no dialog…the design of the monsters…the meaning of the names and colors…how far into the process of dancing around in bedsheets someone decided the real fun would be in destroying them like a lost Argento fever dream? I don’t know how many of these answers we’ll ever get but I can state with certainty that the experiment Red Night attempts succeeds to the fullest degree. Slasher fans…this is the good stuff.
Scare Value
Yes…Red Night is a weird movie. Yes…the lack of dialog is a gimmick that can overwhelm a movie (cough No One Will Save You). But it works here. Obviously, the lack of human characters helps that tremendously. These are the surface things that will catch your eye. What lies beneath them is a unique, original, and surprisingly, effective slasher movie.
