By Night’s End
Quiet, tense and occasionally energetic, By Night’s End is an excellent advocation for the adage that ‘it’s the singer, not the song.’ Explained at its most basic level – a couple going through a rough patch fight off a home invasion that tests their relationship – sounds similar enough to other locked door thrillers it would be easy to dash off as a low rent copy. Instead, Walker Whited’s meditation on the genre finds grace in-between the notes, focusing on execution and ignoring the expensive trap of the high concept.
With the focus of a contained stage drama, By Night’s End never leaves the Heather (Rose) or Mark’s (Yue) steading which is already housing the grief of their recently deceased daughter and increasingly stressful realizations of potential fraud that Heather is been caught in the middle of at work. When a strange man (Aviles) comes prowling around the house at night it becomes clear it’s also hiding some strange treasure secreted by the homes’ original owner, enough to let the couple consummate their growing dream of just escaping their current circumstance and flee to a new life elsewhere, but also enough to kill for.
As the prowlers partners descend on the house and start demanding the treasures return, the screenplay by White and Sean McCane turns quickly to the tried and true elements of the locked room thriller. New dangers (attempts at forced entry through different parts of the home, the arrival of the police responding to the sound of gunfire) spring up periodically before resolving into quiet moments where Mark and Heather finally face the real trauma underlying their recent tension that must be resolved if they’re to have any hope of facing the invaders as a unit.
The familiar mise en scene is not a negative, it’s an essential part of the package. The focus is not so much what Heather and Mark must face as it how Rose and Yue will bring it life, with spare dialogue and raw emotions periodically interrupted by Milligan’s over-the-top villain screeching new demands. Whited makes the most of what he has as well and all to the point of his plot; without the resources to light an entire neighborhood or fill it with people he has instead cut it off from the world. Like the farm in “It’s A Good Life” tormented by Bill Mumy, Heather and Mark’s home may as well exist in its own dimension, cut off from all life around it, the arrival of Moody and his minions the only proof that anything exists other than themselves and their pain.
Not coincidentally it’s only then that Heather and Mark start to come to life and inhabit their external personas again, and Whited makes one of his few changes to the formula in gender flipping the standard roles – former Marine Heather is the physical protector who engages any danger that makes its way in while Mark wilts under the pressure and begins looking for easy ways out of their predicament. It’s Mark who, when it becomes clear the original prowler was looking for something, suggests waiting to call the police and find the hidden treasure themselves and tries to negotiate a way out of the mess when more villains arrive. It’s also Mark, however, who keeps trying to open up the wounds of their lost daughter to try and heal while Heather continually shuts down any emotional response, preferring physical fighting and pain to the spiritual version.
It’s a role that provides a lot for Rose who, by design or not, becomes the focus of any scene she is in as she switches rapidly between subtle internal conflict and setting booby traps or battering invaders with parts of her bathroom. It’s hard for her relationship with Yue to match that level of engagement, she ultimately has for more chemistry and far more in common with Milligan’s Moody who struts back continually around the house yelling out inducements for the couple to surrender.
It’s as pared down as thriller is going to get, removing every piece of garnish or flash to leave only its core story with nothing to distract from it. Rather than run away from the tropes that have made these kinds of things work in the past By Night’s End flies directly for them, reminding that repetition isn’t inherently bad and the new isn’t inherently good, it’s ultimately what the filmmaker makes from them. Walker Whited has made that song his own; that’s the sign of a real artist.