What will you do when the person you love the most is running out of time? It’s not a new question in cinema, but we’ve never seen it handled quite like this in Benjamin Caron’s new Netflix feature film Night Always Comes. Lynette (Vanessa Kirby) is a working-class woman from Portland, Oregon, committed to keeping her family together. When her mother, Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), blows their $25,000 house down payment on a new car, Lynette has one night to come up with the money so she can secure housing for them and her beloved brother Ken (Zack Gottsagen). What follows is a series of night-driving misadventures Lynette must undertake to do what she feels is unavoidable.
This is clearly a vehicle for Kirby, but I am of two minds on her performance and presentation as Lynette. On the one hand, Lynette has been through hell but doesn’t fully show it. She is in dire poverty, survived unspeakable abuse, has no reliable friends, tries to care for her disabled brother without thanks, and is precarious in employment. Something about Kirby, however, is incredibly polished, put-together, and so controlled she almost seems serene when facing peril. Kirby is a movie star here, elegant, not unlike a Princess Margaret of The Crown or the Invisible Woman of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. She does not play this character with consistent desperation, and for most of the runtime, it’s difficult to detect visible cinematic signals for trauma.
And that’s where I pivot to the other hand. We are very used to detecting “visible cinematic signals for trauma.” We are used to people in poverty and abuse survivors looking a certain way, behaving a certain way in film. We are looking for dirt under the fingernails and pained, panicked eyes. You will find very little of this in Kirby. Yes, there are moments when a fire will enter her eyes, either in anger or anguish, but for the most part, she is riding the wave with a command over the turbulent water. It feels off, no doubt, to not see her struggle more, but maybe having representation of a person with PTSD as capable and polished isn’t so bad. What really is an “accurate” depiction of poverty, anyway?
The other trouble, however, is pinpointing who Lynette really is. Others tell us she has temperament problems, and yet most of her most desperate decisions in this film seem logical for her end goal. And her logical end goal is very understandable for the audience, even if we would not make the same decisions in her situation. Again, perhaps like her calmness, this inconsistency serves a particular purpose. Lynette has been told her whole life that she is this thing or that–that she wasn’t really abused, and she isn’t really reliable. But what we see here is a woman who has gone through undeniable pain and who has learned to meticulously choose a path to get what she needs.
As for the rest of the film, it isn’t a loss. The script feels a little too chunky without smooth transitions to add muscle to the bones, but some sequences work well to build tension and an uncomfortable viewing experience. Supporting performances, including some cameos, flesh out the film’s world, and Gottsagen in particular gives a great turn as Lynette’s older brother with Down syndrome, who wants the best for her even as she plummets to achieve what she feels is best for him. Leigh is arguably underutilized, but her character is so painful, so frustrating, that any more screentime might wear the audience thin. We get enough of Doreen to understand exactly what we need to know about Lynette’s life.
Illustrating poverty and abuse on screen will never be easy. Representation can so easily slip into spectacle, and we will always be revisiting the effects of that on us both individually and culturally. Some of our greatest films, of course, stylize violence and drip so-called “poor” neighborhoods in noir. Even cinema depicting difficult subjects can do so with aesthetic panache. With that said, something is missing in Night Always Comes, some important reflection that could raise this story from just another Netflix drop into something more revealing about our current socioeconomic hellscape.
