The Long Night – Film Review

While searching for the parents she’s never known, Grace (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her boyfriend Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk) return to her childhood stomping grounds in the South to investigate a promising lead on her family’s whereabouts. Upon arrival, the couple’s weekend takes a bizarre, terrifying turn as a nightmarish cult and its maniacal leader terrorize the pair en route to fulfilling an ancient, apocalyptic prophecy.

Rich Ragsdale‘s The Long Night is a strange amalgamation of The Purge meets The Strangers which definitely sounds like an incredibly interesting idea but sadly, it ends up being nowhere near as creative as the two films that so clearly inspired it. The script – written by Robert Sheppe and Mark Young – is incredibly sloppy and it constantly seems as though they both wanted to write completely different movies.

In certain scenes, it seems as if the movie is going to be some sort of strange romantic horror film which definitely would’ve been a strange choice. Then, a few moments later, the film drastically switches tones to be a dark and methodical psychological thriller. There are also bits and pieces of The Wicker Man and Midsommar thrown in this jarring genre blender as well, and needless to say, it just doesn’t work whatsoever.

Even the scenes where you can clearly tell what they were going for don’t work because there isn’t any sort of tension that gets introduced anywhere throughout the script. Every slasher in history should make you feel at least something for the characters that are being tormented or targeted by the movie’s main killer. Obviously, the Halloween movies do this effortlessly. Whenever you watch the villainous Michael Myers prey on unsuspecting Laurie Strode, you feel for her because the film makes the wise decision to actually flesh out her character.

There is not a single character in The Long Night that we can root for because Sheppe and Young didn’t bother to write compelling lead characters. It’s basically just a movie about a couple who get preyed on by a group of masked cult members and nothing else. There’s seriously next to nothing in terms of substance here.

I understand that some people don’t mind that, though. There are some people out there who simply want to watch a slasher in the hopes of seeing some bloody great kills and nothing more. But if you’re one of those people, then I hate to break it to you but The Long Night has some of the weakest kills I’ve seen in a horror film in quite some time. Firstly, there’s barely any violence to be found in this movie to begin with, and even when there is, it’s shockingly lazy.

Of course, none of this is the fault of the lead stars Scout Taylor-Compton and Nolan Gerard Funk who are actually quite solid in the film – it’s the fault of the writers and director. Even if Taylor-Compton and Funk delivered two of the best performances of the whole year, it wouldn’t have been enough to save this film from being an incredibly weak and mind-numbingly boring horror film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.