Review of Cold Comes the Night (2013) by Jeffrey M — 14 Mar 2014

A single mother in seemingly dire straits, a mysterious stranger, a seedy hotel, and a lot of money. This is essentially the premise of Cold Comes The Night, an interesting, if not entirely successful, neo noir film. The film follows a desperate hotel owner, the resourceful Alice Eve, who finds herself in a ever-escalating series of precarious events. It's a film that has a number of successful elements, yet never fully delivers on its full potential.

What's great about Cold Comes The Night has a lot to do with Alice Eve, who has a fantastic performance as a single mom. She feels believable, and is set in a very "lived-in" gritty, barren, and coldly realistic world. The family dynamics between her and her daughter are particularly strong. This part of the story offers an interesting premise, with Eve playing a strong and refreshingly pragmatic and cunning female lead.

For his part, Bryan Cranston also has a fine performance, save for his accent, which never works for him. The problem with his character, and indeed all of the secondary characters, is that they are too thinly written. Besides Eve, no one on screen feels like they have time to breath, particularly true of Logan Marshall-Green's character, who feels adrift and out of place in the entire film. This is a symptom largely of unfocused and underdeveloped screenwriting. The film gets too caught up with its own cleverness, which becomes a bit cliché and all too familiar, that it forgets the real hinge of noir pieces, interesting characters that we care about.

To be sure, Tze Chun does a generally good job creating an atmospheric tone, a noir-friendly word, and seems to appreciate the coldness with which such pieces should be directed. For this, the film is always watchable. Yet the narrative flaws and overly compact narrative, which unravels in the third act, keep it from being particularly memorable.

3/5 Stars.