LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL

The genuinely unsettling, cleverly constructed and smartly ambiguous Late Night with the Devil is a great showcase for actor David Dastmalchian even if the final act is a major let-down.

Constructed as a documentary that unearths the long lost master tape of an infamous seventies late night talk show episode Late Night with the Devil does something pleasingly novel with demonic horror tropes.

You’d think a picture that for the majority of its runtime employs a multi-cam talk show aesthetic might have trouble engaging you on a visceral level, but Late Night with the Devil pulls off the trick. With each new segment, as ever more ghoulish, unsettling things occur on the set, you are drawn closer to the screen. All credit to the filmmakers that throughout they expertly keep you guessing about how much of the horror is real and how much is in your mind.

This way, not only does the film evoke the creeping dread and unease of films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, in its narrative about a TV show host who will do anything to achieve good ratings during sweeps week Late Night with the Devil plays out as an interesting horror companion piece to one of the seventies’ major masterpieces: Network.

Late Night with the Devil is also of note for giving one of the great character actors of our age, David Dastmalchian, a rare lead role. The actor knocks his performance out of the park. As a viewer you easily latch onto his growing disquiet, even if the role requires Dastmalchian to be a little too creepy and uncomfortable to be a plausible, real late night talk show host.

With all these positive elements going for it, it’s an utter shame that the picture stumbles badly in its final fifteen minutes. The film settles on a dime-a-dozen horror finale that ends abruptly and all but negates the clever, genre-busting setup. How much more chilling and memorable a movie Late Night with the Devil could have been had it stuck the landing.

release: 2024

director: Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes

starring: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi