Maybe
it is a coincidence, but this film produced with funding from Petrobras, Brazil’s
petroleum consortium, spends a long flashback in the parking lot of a gas
station. At least the behavior of the teen characters makes sense there. In
contrast, logic craters into dust when they decide to take a short holiday on a
sparsely inhabited equatorial island. Supposedly what happens reflects their
fear of the future, but they probably don’t have one to look forward to in Ramon
Porto Mota’s The Yellow Night, which had its North American premiere at
the 2019 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
There
are not a lot of people living on Arco Velho, but the beaches are nice and
Mariana’s grandfather has a house there. Of course, wireless service is kaput
and the statue by the harbor has been decapitated, but they remain undeterred,
even when their no-show ride leaves them stranded at the nearly deserted dock.
Eventually, they make their way to Grandfather’s house, but he is nowhere to be
found. By now, we can tell this is a bad situation, but for some reason they
can’t. They even stick around after watching a suspicious VHS tape, in which
the missing grandpa discusses his quantum mechanical research and how it was
driving him bonkers. Instead of fleeing, they revisit happier times in the gas
station parking lot.
To
give credit where it is due, Porto makes inventive use of split-screens and cinematographer
Flora Dias lights it all in ways that maximize the eeriness and the nagging
sense of uncertainty. However, the film is maddeningly coy in the way it
presents its time loops—at least we’re assuming that is what is happening,
since it would be consistent with all of Grandpa’s quantum double-talk.
Films
like Benson & Moorhead’s The Endless and Jon Mikel Caballero’s The Incredible Shrinking WKND maintained plenty of mystery and suspense, but
they always kept viewers keenly aware of where they were in each loop. In
contrast, everything just sloshes around in Yellow Night, like the
characters are waiting Pirandello-like, for a stronger editor to come along and
re-establish some order.
Among
the characters, Karina is the rebellious one who sort of seems to have the “shine.”
The rest are just stupid teens, who really do not have anything to distinguish
themselves. Not even Rana Sui makes any lasting impression as Karina, but she
has a bit of an excuse, since her character mysteriously disappears for a large
stretch of time.
