In Gone in the Night, Winona Ryder and John Gallagher Jr. play a vacationing couple who show up at the isolated cabin they’ve rented for the weekend only to find another couple, played by Owen Teague and Brianne Tju, already settled in for the night. Well, it’s late and a long drive to the nearest motel, so, hey, there’s obviously been some kind of mix-up, but they’ll figure all that out in the morning and the four agree, with various degrees of enthusiasm, to share the cabin for the night. No prizes for guessing that not everyone who enters the cabin that night is there the next morning. And from there, I’ll say no more about the plot, except to say that Winona Ryder’s character is compelled to find out exactly what happened that night.
I don’t really know why I’m not spoiling this movie, but I’m not. I mean, I’m not really recommending it. This is filmed and written by Eli Horowitz like your classic basic cable movie; if Winona Ryder hadn’t signed on, this would definitely be debuting on . . . well, not on Lifetime, but you know some channel about one degree grittier. Horowitz has no idea how to build tension, even in situations where there should be some organically and no idea how to create atmosphere. And the dialogue is often pretty silly, though I will say that I enjoyed my time with this movie sufficiently enough that I’ll say he does a good enough job with a kind of flashback-flashforward structure that I was interested in seeing how the mystery unfolded.
And, boy, oh, boy, does it ever unfold. There were a couple of moments in the film where I thought they were hinting at a couple of different possible solutions to the mystery and, you know, those two solutions honestly . . . well, one of them would have been the laziest possible solution and the other one would have been the stupidest. And I have to say that neither of those solutions were the actual solution! Don’t get me wrong, the actual solution is very stupid, but it was neither the laziest or the most stupid and I found its particular details to be refreshingly stupid, not annoyingly so.
Just a quick word for the performances. Winona Ryder is good, of course, crafting a kind of neurotic character right from the jump. Dermot Mulrony, a guy I always love to see, has charm and charisma as a guy who gets pulled into the mystery. I have to say the two most fun performances were from the young couple from the cabin. Brianne Tju really steals every scene she’s in as the girl; she’s a live wire and so entertainingly over the top that, if a movie this mediocre was capable of making a star, it would be a star-making performance. Owen Teague is the guy and he’s an actor that I’ve struggled with in the past; I’m still not sure how good he really is, but he’s weird and that’s what you need in this movie and in this role. They were just a ton of fun to watch. I kind of wish the rest of the movie had committed to being as weird as they were. If the tone of the movie had kept up with Tju’s over-the-top, wacky energy, it might have been more successful as a campier thriller. That tone certainly would have worked better with the ultimate solution to the mystery which feels kind of out of step with what has been, up to that point, a fairly somber and serious film.
Anyway, I’ve talked about this movie more than anyone probably should talk about it. Like I say, it’s overall mediocre and it’s not a movie anyone NEEDS to watch. Still, it has some pleasures that pop out of the spare background quite well. And I think I forgot to mention: credits included, it runs 85 minutes. Give me a thriller under 90 minutes and I will forgive a LOT. Enough to make this get a recommendation from me? No, not really, but certainly enough that I’m not going to recommend against it. I had a pretty decent time at this movie. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – good premise some good performances, but there’s no tension or atmosphere in this overall mediocre “thriller;” the ending is silly, but kind of fun in a TV-movie kind of way. 2 ½ stars.