NIGHT SHIFT movie poster | ©2024 Quiver Distribution

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Phoebe Tonkin, Madison Hu, Patrick Fischler, Lauren Bowles, Christopher Denham, Lamorne Morris
Writers: The China Brothers (Paul China & Ben China)
Directors: The China Brothers (Paul China & Ben China)
Distributor: Quiver Distribution
Release Date: March 8, 2024 (theatrical, VOD)

PSYCHO, VACANCY and many other movies have found ways to make barely-tenanted motels terrifying. NIGHT SHIFT joins the subgenre, and if it’s not a Hitchcockian classic, it’s still pretty effective.

NIGHT SHIFT begins with an atmospheric shot of a car driving down a lonely road. The lights of a town twinkle in the distance, but we’ll never get nearer to them than the wayside All Tucked In Motel.

Gwen Taylor (Phoebe Tonkin), the car’s driver, pulls up at the motel. It turns out she’s a new last-minute hire as the night shift clerk, as the previous clerk quit in a hurry.

On the one hand, motel owner Teddy Miles (Lamorne Morris) seems like a regular businessman who is eager for his employee to settle in so things can get back to normal.

On the other hand, by the time Teddy assures Gwen that “This place is harmless,” we are sure that’s not the case. Only one of the fourteen cabins is occupied. There are strange noises. There are a lot of taxidermied animals on display. The drained swimming pool has a growing sinkhole that resembles a bodily orifice. And once Teddy leaves for the night, the phone starts ringing from an extension in a supposedly vacant cabin, an ominous-looking vehicle keeps coming around, and, oh yeah, there are ghosts.

The China Brothers, Paul & Ben, wrote and directed NIGHT SHIFT. They excel at setting up an air of foreboding, contrasting the clutter of the surroundings with the emptiness of human warmth.

The filmmakers also do very well with timing plot twists big and small, planting small details that pay off big later. They’re also happy to take a spin into a different kind of weirdness in Act Two, putting us just off-balance enough so that we’re primed to be even more alarmed in Act Three.

Tonkin is a great audience surrogate when called upon to be one, conveying just the right amount of paranoia and self-doubt. Madison Hu scores as an initially hostile runaway teen. Morris puts humor and the tiniest bit of danger into Teddy, and Patrick Fischler and Lauren Bowles inject real unpredictability into the night.

NIGHT SHIFT does suffer from over-extending suspension of disbelief in its last scene, where we’re left to wonder how things can have turned out exactly this way. But by then, we’ve been provided with a lot of efficiently-performed genre satisfactions, including ambience, jump scares, ongoing dread, and surprises.

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