The Devil Comes at Night (2022)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Low-Budget Canadian feature film The Devil Comes at Night doesn’t look like much at first—much of the story takes place in an isolated house at night, featuring mysteriously sketched characters that may or may not be lying through their teeth. But as the film progresses, everything comes into focus—the backstory of the male lead, the appearance of a female lead who won’t be defined by her job as a librarian, and the nature of the threat posed by Satanists outside the doors of a rather strange house. It’s all a bit simple by the end, but it’s effectively delivered with cinematography that doesn’t often show the limits of its budget. The result isn’t perfect—after all, the film gets fuzzy with its mythology, as the supernatural rubs shoulders with the realistic, the time-limited nighttime cinematography gets duller than it should, and some of the plot points could have been streamlined. Still, The Devil Comes at Night is not a bad showing from writer-director Scott Leaver and writer-star Adrienne Kress, considering their limited means and carefully scoped intentions.