Take the Night
There’s nothing worse than planning a birthday party. Creating just the right mixture of expectation and surprise, wrangling attendees, anticipating wants and needs without signaling plans or knowing entirely what the audience wants. It’s like making a movie but with more immediate emotional devastation if it’s not exactly what everyone wants.
William Chang (Huang) has cooked up a doozy for his brother Robert (Li), one that will unravel dark consequences for them and everyone involved. Dark and twisty, Seth McTigue’s Take the Night plumbs the psychological depths of envy and need with plenty of mood even if the plot doesn’t move particularly fast.
Jealous and spiteful, William has never forgiven Robert for being the one to be given total control of the family company, filling their relationship with passive aggressive sniping. He takes that gnawing envy past its darkest limits when he plans a fake kidnapping of Robert as part of his birthday party, giving him a few moments of fear and uncertainty as payment for his easy and unearned privilege. Hiring a group of professional (not to mention poor and desperate) criminals to pull off his prank, with no real thought about outcomes beyond Robert’s immediate fear, William is amazingly surprised when Robert is hurt for real and the criminals use the kidnapping to gain access to the company’s assets. Hurt and envy quickly metastasize into backstabbing and fear as brother turns on brother and friend turns on friend under the lure of sudden wealth.
High-concept thrills gives way to complex character work as McTigue contrasts the relationships of the brothers and the criminals and their underlying fragility. The dichotomy of the wealthy and the poor and how easily desire crosses that seemingly impenetrable class barrier is the heart of Take the Night, mostly through William’s barely concealed condescension of his brother and criminal-in-charge Chad’s (McTigue) attempt to keep his gang together amid the tension of the kidnapping. While William blinds himself to what he already has, Chad is only ever aware of what he doesn’t and what an opportunity it is to get access, even briefly, to the Chang family fortune. As surrounded as he is by the pain money causes, however, he never quite realizes how easily that pain could transfer to himself and his people.
Twisty, a little meandering but with pointed messaging of greed and wealth, writer/director/star McTigue keeps everything together even as his plot attempts to derail itself. His Chad is the depleted conscience of Take the Night, seemingly the only person able to feel the pain of the world and what he is doing to it, even if that empathy isn’t enough to stop him. Huang and Li, by contrast, have to be much more self-involved and oblique in order to protect plot turns, but at the cost of placing them at a remove from the audience’s care. From time to time it’s not always entirely clear what is happening to them.
Quibbles aside, Take the Night is a fine addition to the thriller oeuvre. It slows down to take time with its characters, which keeps it from always showing real care to its plot twists. There are multiple ways to have approached the clever premise, from comedy to action to pure thriller. Perhaps Night’s best surprise is refusing any of those options and making its own identity. A focus on character and strong performances from Li, Huang and Tigue keep the story on the straight and narrow and converging to something more than just tragedy. Hopefully McTigue takes what he’s learned here and returns to the genre – it feels like a real classic is somewhere just in the making. That would make for a nice surprise.
TAKE THE NIGHT RATING: 7/10
Saban Films’ Take the Night was directed by Seth McTigue and Stars Roy Huang, Sam Song Li and Seth Mctigue.