I first saw Late Night with the Devil at London Film Festival last autumn, and it has been embedded in my brain ever since, like an itchy splinter. I thought: This is an astonishing movie: uniquely fresh and original while also deeply lodged in the history of cinematic horror, with a powerful breakout lead performance from long-time “oh, it’s that guy” David Dastmalchian, who has been, onscreen, the most delightful weirdo — perhaps most notably as “Polka-Dot Man” in 2021’s The Suicide Squad; he also has small roles in that year’s Dune and the recent Oppenheimer — and here exudes true movie-star quality.
I wish I had reviewed this five months ago, but I’ve been dealing with my own mental-health issues that aren’t a million miles away the crisis of confidence that Dastmalchian’s troubled protagonist is coping with here. I couldn’t manage it, so I was happy that the film had scored a theatrical release on both sides of the Atlantic, which meant another opportunity to review it. But it’s all been a bit soured by the recent news that the filmmakers — the writing-directing team of Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes — utilized “AI” “art” in their production design.
I suspect that the general public doesn’t yet understand how programs erroneously dubbed “AI” are being deployed and the capacity this has to inflict enormous damage in both visual and written creative arts. In brief, computer algorithms that are nowhere near artificially intelligent have been trained on the enormous quantities of written text and visual art (drawings, paintings, photos, etc) available online to spit out what are essentially remixes of that preexisting material. These “AI”s do this in response to human-generated “prompts,” such as, for instance, “image of a walkable city with lots of greenery and beautiful buildings” or “write a literary essay exploring the themes in George Orwell’s novels.” But resulting text meant to sound natural is often stilted and rife with factual errors and references, such as to supposed scientific papers or legal decisions, that are outright inventions. Visual results meant to look realistic are often full of bizarre nonsense, like human figures with too many limbs or fingers, or impossible angles or lighting.
If you’re Extremely Online, as I am, you’ve already come across numerous examples of human writers, voiceover performers, and visual artists complaining about losing paying jobs to “AI,” including so-called deepfake video technology. (One of the issues behind last year’s Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guide strikes was studio use of these “AI” algorithms to replace their members’ work.) Even though there is no authentic creative effort or considered thought behind the output of these programs — they are incapable of conceiving anything new — they are already substituting, if poorly, for human innovation and inventiveness.
This is where Late Night with the Devil utilizes “AI”-generated visuals:
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The movie is mostly set over the course of a single episode, which we’re told went out live on Halloween night 1977, of a (fictional) American late-night talk show called Night Owls, which aired on the (fictional) network UBC. The seasonally appropriate show logo (in this still from the trailer; it appears regularly in the film) was created not by a human artist but by “AI”: the wonky windows on the skyline building are a dead giveaway.
Here’s another of the show’s interstitials, a title card welcoming viewers back from commercials:
Here the missing fingers on the skeleton clue us in to the fact that the image has been generated by “AI.”
Now, you might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a couple of images in the background.” There are many reasons why this is a big deal, perhaps not least: 1) the actual creative work of actual human beings was stolen without permission or recompense and repurposed by a computer program to concoct these images, and 2) actual creative artists were therefore not paid to work on this film in this capacity. It’s bad enough when money-grubbing, artist-denigrating megacorporate Hollywood studios do this — it’s not forgivable, of course, but it’s certainly well within their vampire-capitalist wheelhouse — but it’s far worse when a scrappy little indie production like this one does it. If the fire of human weirdness and invention is not appreciated by a pair of maverick brother filmmakers like the Cairneses, working so far outside of Hollywood that they’re literally on the opposite side of the planet — Late Night was shot in Melbourne — then what hope is there for anyone who just wants to be an arty freakazoid eking out a little living with their ingenious eccentricity?
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I don’t know the Cairneses’ previous work, but I don’t understand how you can have the kind of deliciously disturbed imagination that rustles up the bonkersly off-kilter Late Night with the Devil and not understand that legitimizing the theft of bona-fide human imagination is so uncool. (Here’s a good Twitter thread on why this is a big deal and why it’s important to send filmmakers and studios the message that this is Not Okay.)
The long dark late-night monologue of the soul…
Dedicated movie fans are engaging in personal boycotts of this movie over the “AI” issue, they feel that deeply that this is a huge problem, and I am very much on their side. I debated with myself whether I should even give the movie what small exposure a review from me would bring it. I decided it was worth it in order to highlight this issue for the vast majority of movie lovers who are not Extremely Online. Because letting mindless computer algorithms built on the hijacked work of creative human beings is going to be very very very bad for anyone who cares about the work of creative human beings, such as movies. We are at the narrowest edge of a horrible wedge, and the time to push back is now.
Here’s the incredibly ironic thing about Late Night with the Devil: it is, at its heart, a story about a creative man who is, as I mentioned earlier, suffering a crisis of creative confidence and also, most likely, creative burnout. Dastmalchian’s late-night TV host Jack Delroy, a former Chicago radio personality, just cannot seem to make enough of a dent in the popularity of his competition: ur–late night TV host Johnny Carson and his The Tonight Show. We learn this in the mockumentary opening of the film, which sets the stage for the 1977 Halloween broadcast: Delroy is a man who has been on a roller coaster of personal tragedy and professional success and intrigue all around: he’s a member of an arcane secret society — of, natch, white men — known to make or break careers. Delroy’s career isn’t quite broken, but it’s not as solid as it could be. Maybe there’s a way he can bolster himself and his show? Via, like, some arcane stuff? *gulp*
If nothing else, the 1970s palette is pretty terrifying.
Oh, so, why burnout? In 1977, The Tonight Show ran for 261 episodes, one for basically every weeknight of the year. It’s a grueling schedule. Night Owls would have had a similar run. (Watching this movie at London Film Festival was a surreal experience for me, as a transatlantic type, for more reasons than the uncanny stuff happening onscreen, because there is no British equivalent of the American late-night-talk-show ecology; perhaps the closest thing in the 2020s is the solitary example of The Graham Norton Show, which airs only once a week, not nightly, and then only typically for half the year.) Late-night is a meatgrinder of American television. Like, no wonder someone might turn to the supernatural for an assist.
Wait, what?
The faux-documentary-style narrator informs us that we are about to be treated to the “recently discovered master tape of what went to air that night, as well as previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage.” It was, we are told, “the live-TV event that shocked the nation.”
Up next: an exorcism. But first a word from our sponsors…
What we witness in its ersatz-70s glory is late-night American TV at its cheesy apex. Guests for Delroy and his goofy punching-bag sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri) include Uri Geller–esque psychic performer Christou (Fayssal Bazzi: Peter Rabbit), who does hilariously terrible (from our 2020s perspective) cold-readings on the studio audience; paranormal skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss: The Matrix Revolutions), clearly modeled on James Randi, who throws cold water over Christou; and parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon: Foe),who’s just written a book about her work with a teen Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), a waif rescued from a “satanic cult” and allegedly in the grips of a “psychic infestation” — Ross-Mitchell prefers that term over “demonic possession.” It’s all so very late-70s: this was the era of Amityville Horror paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, of The Omen and The Exorcist. This was the cultural stew from which the so-called satanic-panic bullshit of the 1980s would spring.
Now, the mockumentary conceit falls down in the behind-the-scenes stuff, which purports to show what is happening backstage at the Night Owls studio while the live feed goes to commercial break. But we never understand who is shooting this material, or why… and it certainly never makes sense that these people would be having the conversations that they’re having if there was a camera there recording them. I don’t mind that much, because a breakdown of the documentary style is necessary for the ambiguous ending to work… which it does.
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Maybe I shouldn’t have signed that contract in blood?
I found it all a perfectly pitched nightmare of overegged ambition and an anything-for-success drive, and a sly twisting of the cosy familiarity of late-night TV, meant to soothe its viewers at home into sleep and not do, er, what this episode of Night Owls does. The entire cast is terrific, but this is Dastmalchian’s showcase, and he is marvelous: he nails the quirky but easy charisma late-night demands.
But the triumph of Late Night with the Devil is absolutely marred by the Cairneses own little deal with the AI devil. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” Jack moans as his Halloween episode goes to credits. It’s a shame that the same could be said about this film.
more films like this: • The Last Exorcism [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV] • What We Do in the Shadows [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BBC iPlayer UK | Shudder UK]
Kunal Nayyar in ‘Christmas Karma’
| Photo Credit: True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
Christmas jumpers are all I can remember of this film. As this reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol dragged on with sickly-sweet sentimentality and song, my eyes constantly tried to work out whether those snowflakes and reindeer were printed on the jerseys or, if knitted, how complicated the patterns would have been.
Christmas Karma (English)
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Starring: Kunal Nayyar, Leo Suter, Charithra Chandran, Pixie Lott, Danny Dyer, Boy George, Hugh Bonneville, Billy Porter, Eva Longoria, Mia Lomer
Storyline: A miserly businessman learns the true meaning of Christmas when visited by ghosts of Christmas past, present and future
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Runtime: 114 minutes
Gurinder Chadha, who gave us the gorgeous Bend it Like Beckham (who wants to make aloo gobi when you can bend the ball like Beckham indeed) has served up an unappetising Bollywood song-and-dance version of Dickens’ famous Christmas story.
A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
A curmudgeonly Indian businessman, Ishaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar), fires his entire staff on Christmas Eve—except his accountant, Bob (Leo Suter)—after catching them partying at the office. Sood’s nephew, Raj (Shubham Saraf) invites him for a Christmas party which he refuses to attend.
He returns home after yelling at some carol singers for making a noise, the shopkeeper (Nitin Ganatra) at the corner for his business decisions and a cabbie (Danny Dyer) for being too cheerful.
His cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Joshi (Shobu Kapoor) tells him to enjoy his dinner in the dark as he has not paid for heat or electricity. He is visited by the spirit of his dead business partner, Marley (Hugh Bonneville), who is in chains with the spirits of all the people he wronged. Marley’s spirit tells Sood that he will be visited by three spirits who will reveal important life lessons.
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A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
True Bit Entertainment/YouTube
The Ghost of Christmas Past (Eva Longoria), with Day of the Dead makeup and three mariachis providing musical accompaniment, shows Sood his early, happy days in Uganda as a child and the trauma of being expelled from the country by Idi Amin.
Sood comes to Britain where his father dies of heartbreak and decides the only way out is to earn a lot of money. He meets and falls in love with Bea (Charithra Chandran) but loses her when he chooses paisa over pyaar even though he tries to tell her he is being ruthless only to earn enough to keep her in luxury.
The Ghost of Christmas Present (Billy Porter) shows Bob’s twee house full of Christmas cheer, despite the roast chicken past its sell-by date, and his young son, Tim, bravely smiling despite his illness.
The Ghost of Christmas Future (Boy George, Karma is sure a chameleon!) shows Sood dying alone except for Bob and Mrs. Joshi. He sees the error of his ways and throws much money around as he makes everything alright. He even ends up meeting up with his childhood friend in Uganda.
Apart from the mixed messages (money makes everything alright, let us pray for the NHS but go to Switzerland to get well) and schmaltzy songs, Christmas Karma suffers from weak writing and wooden acting.
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Priyanka Chopra’s Hindi rendition of George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’ runs over the end credits featuring Chadha and the crew, bringing back fond memories of Bina Mistry’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’ from Bend it Like Beckham. Even a sitar version by Anoushka Shankar is to no avail as watching this version of A Christmas Carol ensures bad karma in spades.
An orphaned girl hires her hitman next-door neighbor to kill the monster under her bed. This R-rated action/horror movie mashup has lots of violence but surprisingly little gore. However, there are still many gruesome moments, even if they’re just offscreen. And some language and a strange portrayal of Christian worship come up, too.
Across the three feature films he’s made to date, the 36-year-old Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan has proven himself prodigiously gifted at manipulating the parameters of time and space through moving images, resulting in visually astonishing, narratively diffuse feats of showmanship that drift and shift in accordance with a self-consciously slippery dream logic.
In his 2015 debut, “Kaili Blues,” which maps the contours of the area around his hometown, Kaili City, in southwestern Guizhou province, Bi traced the psychic and physical geography of his own youth to reflect on rural China’s relationship to the country’s rapidly advancing modernity. Wandering the streets and alleys of a riverside village in a bravura long take that collapsed its past, present, and future in a swirl, he announced himself as a boldly cinematic voice, one for whom restless yearning to escape from existentially impoverished realities into fantastic, subconscious realms was clearly a formal and thematic imperative.
His elliptical debut turned out to be mere table-setting for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a labyrinthine neo-noir that—despite unfurling across Guizhou province—was a more baroque, impersonal affair. Following another drifter in search of a missing person, Bi reinterpreted this generic premise as a jumping-off point to meditate at large on time, memory, and cinema’s role in shaping both, enumerating his influences—among them Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Andrei Tarkovsky, the latter of whom Bi has openly referred to as a formative inspiration—while burnishing his international reputation as a filmmaker capable of traversing stylistic boundaries with supreme confidence. Again came a fluid long take, this time in the form of an hour-long 3D sequence shot that started once its protagonist took his seat at a run-down movie house.
This sophomore effort—technically a leap forward, one achieved with a surfeit of production resources—brought Bi toward other issues, none unfamiliar for an emerging auteur with his emphases. Most glaringly, for all the puzzling surface pleasures wrought by its heightened stylization and oblique storyline, the film felt consciously artificial, all but completely lacking its predecessor’s tactility. If “Kaili Blues” laid the groundwork for Bi’s cineastic language, it also grounded him in a localized context where his abstractions could still accrue atmospheric density. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” might be seen as unburdened by its aversion to narrative or emotional clarity, but its flourishes felt curiously weightless and inconsequential.
“Resurrection,” Bi’s third feature, is no less staggering than his last two, and it’s saturated with some of the more striking images you’re likely to see in a theater this year. Still, its onerously oneiric progression is a disappointing development, signaling a greater shift from the yearning poetics of Bi’s past work toward circular meta-cinematic pastiche. If his previous films were concerned with exploring time and memory, the subject of dreaming is what most moves Bi in “Resurrection” — but in all three instances, his thesis is essentially the same self-reflexive assertion of belief in cinema’s power to reflect the experience of our inner journeys.
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Styled as a love letter to the grand illusion of cinema, albeit one to be read upon its deathbed, “Resurrection” opens in a fitfully imagined alternate reality where imagination itself has become imperiled. People have discovered that the secret to immortality lies in no longer dreaming. However, a small subset of the population has defied this anti-dreaming decree, preferring to still revel in fantasies despite the fact that this significantly shortens their lifespans. (A series of intertitles, styled to emulate those of the silent-film era, compares people not dreaming to “candles that do not burn,” and Bi consistently returns to this metaphor across each of the film’s chapters.)
Dream dissidents, known as “Deliriants,” are summarily outcast from society and hunted down by “Other Ones,” who are capable of entering their dreams and do so to extinguish them, lest these outliers become monstrous. “Resurrection” follows one Deliriant, played by Chinese pop star and actor Jackson Yee, as he shapeshifts from dream to dream at the behest of an Other One (Shu Qi), who installs a film projector inside him as a seeming act of mercy, allowing him a few reveries more before his inevitable death. Comprising the rest of the film, each of the Deliriant’s dream scenarios is linked to a different era of moviemaking, from German expressionism to neon-streaked, Wong Kar-wai-indebted romanticism; Bi also connects each vignette to one of the five senses and places them in distinct periods of 20th-century Chinese history.
The most spellbinding section comes first, through Bi’s tribute to silent melodrama, as the Other One hunts Yee’s Deliriant through what appears to be a Chinese opium den but soon transforms into a byzantine maze of exaggerated, crooked film-set backdrops. Evoking memories of both Murnau and Méliès, the accomplished production design of “Resurrection”—by Liu Qiang and Tu Nan—shines brightest here. Through its successive sections, the film then morphs into a war-time espionage thriller, adrift in smoke and mirrors; a folktale set in the ruins of a Buddhist temple, involving a thief and a trickster god; a tragicomic riff on “Paper Moon,” about a con artist and his orphan apprentice who allege they can identify playing cards by smell; and, finally, a woozy romance between two young lovers—one seemingly a vampire—on the eve of the new millennium, this last part playing out as another of Bi’s virtuosic long takes.
The ambition, as we’ve come to expect from him, is overpowering. “Resurrection” is alternately a sci-fi picture, a monster movie, a film noir, a cryptic parable, a crime caper, and a gangland romance — and it’s sometimes all of the above, blurring tones and textures to suggest a certain metamorphic potential within each of the stories as the Deliriant experiences them. Yet there’s a curiously draining quality to Bi’s film as well, one that feels related less to its sprawling scope than to the repetitive, riddling nature of the segments therein. As a procession of characters is transmogrified in strange ways, or otherwise meet surprising ends, across a series of abstruse set pieces that function primarily to pay homage to various techniques, Bi’s dominant mood is one of plaintive desolation, and this wears thin as quickly as all the willfully ersatz dialogue he invites audiences to puzzle over.
Bi’s reverence for the century of cinema he references throughout “Resurrection” is indisputable, and the sheer opulence on display will leave some enraptured. Certainly, in terms of production design and cinematography, he’s assembled an intimidating contraption made up of far too many moving parts to track upon initial viewing. But the effect of this outsized ambition is often mannered, even mechanistic.
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For all its waxing lyrical about the need for humanity to keep dreaming through cinema, all its technically polished tributes to film history, its showmanship lacks emotional substance. If imitation is the sincerest act of flattery, here it also proves flattening; as in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Bi enshrines his influences through recurrent motifs and symbols, through one assured demonstration of a recognizable style after another, but in doing so he also entombs them, creating a film that feels like less a work of imaginative possibility from an ascendant master than an act of preservation by a dutiful curator.
Paradoxically, for a film about the undying essence of the movies, what’s missing is any more molten, organic sense of processing that would evoke the true surreality of dream states. In place of an artist’s passion, Bi’s cold touch carries an undertaker’s sense of ceremony. Without a deeper subconscious drive behind his construction, it also lacks the intense aura of mystery and desire one would welcome in a grand monument like this. Instead, Bi has erected a series of simulacra, a hall of mirrors that reflect one another endlessly yet also indifferently; its images only seem to grow smaller and smaller as they recede into infinite distance. “Resurrection” is ravishing in its command of shadow and light, but it studiously hollows out any sense of soul beneath the surface.
“Resurrection” is now in theaters, via Janus Films.
