The Vast of Night (2020) is a spiritual successor to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. This film understands the power of the spoken word (its heroes are a late night DJ and a phone operator), and puts it to great use to tell a fascinating story that relies more on the viewer’s imagination than on visual effects.

This is the rare low-budget ($700,000) sci-fi flick that doesn’t strive to mask its technical shortcomings with a layer of shoddy CGI, instead focusing on a character and dialogue-driven plot. This is not a cheap movie, but an economic one — austere, even; a ‘less is more’ approach that turns at times into 'nothing is better.’

Co-writer/director Andrew Patterson isn’t trying to convince us that his aliens are real, but neither does he expose them to unforgivably prying eyes; sticking to the Lovecraftian definition of fear, Patterson wisely makes them conspicuous precisely by their absence (only at the very end do we see the outline of a spaceship, a convincing shot not least because it takes place under cover of night).

The Vast of Night works because it isn’t about the visceral horror caused by a monster from outer space as it is about the psychological terror of the unknown — what we can’t see but sense is there, lurking in the dark, watching us.