Any horror movie about a family trapped in a creepy hotel faces stiff competition, not least from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Kourosh Ahari’s more modest effort cannot match that standard, but it has some genuinely spooky moments and carries a special distinction in that it is the first American production approved for distribution in Iran in decades.
The couple at the center of things is Babak and Nada Naderi (Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor). He is an emergency room doctor who has been in America for some time; she joined him later and has since given birth to their infant daughter. While they are driving home from a gathering with other Iranian expatriates, their GPS goes crazy and they get lost, leading Nada to suggest they spend the night in a hotel. They find the Normandie, where after a brief encounter with a homeless man on the street, they register with an officious, prim receptionist (George Maguire) and proceed to a room on the fourth floor. But they find little peace there.
Strange noises keep them awake, and someone knocks at their door. When Nada opens it, a little boy quickly scuttles away, refusing to respond to her questions. Eventually, they call a policeman (Michael Graham), but he spends more time expressing suspicions of them than commiserating. Even more alarming are the doubles who start to appear: Babak and Nada begin to see one another doing things that they deny doing at all, including carrying the baby, which cries and fusses all night, down to the lobby. And a ghostly robed figure occasionally materializes. Of course, the couple's attempts to leave this twilight zone are thwarted. Ahari sustains a menacing mood throughout, culminating in an unsettling sequence involving Babak and a mirror.
But ultimately he and co-writer Milad Jarmooz feel compelled to provide a rationale for all the weird goings-on, and it proves to be altogether too obvious, suggesting that the couple deserves to suffer because of dark secrets they have kept from one another. That is a sadly prosaic denouement to a cinematic nightmare that until then has been visually poetic and pleasurably enigmatic. The Night earns points for style, but in narrative terms, it ends up a bit of a letdown: it would have been better to let the audience stew in mystery rather than be spoon-fed a banal explanation. In its lack of gore, however, the movie remains a laudable outlier among contemporary horror films, which are generally crudely explicit. A strong optional purchase.