Friday, January 17, 2025

Night Call, Co-Starring Romain Duris as a Bad Guy

The right to protest must always be preserved, but its always best to take a break and start fresh in the morning. All-night demonstrations are dangerous because both protesters and cops get tired, making it harder for cool heads to prevail. Indeed, an all-night BLM protest in Brussels further complicates a locksmith’s night-from-heck in director-screenwriter Michiel Blanchart’s Night Call, which opens today in theaters.

Mady Bala is not an idiot. He requires proper ID and cash payment for his late-night house-calls, but for some reason, he trusts “Claire.” After all, she perfectly describes the apartment’s interior. However, she scoots out with a package of something just before the real tenant, a white supremacist drug dealer, returns home.

Somehow, Bala kills the raging thug in self-defense, but the long-running protests convince the misguided locksmith to clean-up the crime scene instead of calling the cops. So, there he is, looking extremely guilty when druglord Yannick’s men arrive for their money, finding him instead. After some enhanced interrogation, Yannick starts to suspect Bala might be telling the truth, so he sends the poor patsy off to the dead man’s favorite sex-worker club in search of the mystery woman. Inconveniently, one of the henchmen minding him is aggressively ill-tempered and the other was in on the theft.

It seems pretty clear Blanchart sympathizes with the movement, judging from Bala’s anxieties regarding the police. Yet, ironically, the demonstrators constantly make his situation worse. In fact, the protest—which is really more of a contained riot—precipitate several of the darned things in Blanchart’s one-darned-thing-after-another storyline. There are also a handful of violent eruptions that are not exceptionally graphic, but are still shocking within the dramatic context.

Regardless,
Night Call offers a rare opportunity to see Romain Duris portraying a villain, the ruthless Yannick, a role he totally crushes. Jonathan Feltre also broods with quiet fire as Bala. Plus, Jonas Bloquet and Thomas Mustin are also all kinds of edgy and erratic as Yannick’s lieutenants.

Blanchart’s taut execution and Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe’s dreamy nocturnal cinematography are both quite distinctive. Together, they find the right balance of style and grunge.
Night Call also suggests Duris should consider playing more bad guys. Recommended for fans of noir thrillers, it opens today (1/17) in New York at the Lower Manhattan Drafthouse.