SBIFF ’20: The Night

Airbnb horror is a relatively new phenomenon, but it follows squarely in the tradition of hotel horror. Some of the genre’s best have been set in hotels and motels, like The Shining, the Psycho franchise, and Horror Hotel, starring the great Sir Christopher Lee. Maybe we our just intuitively unsettled by the experience of temporarily making your home in a strange room, knowing full well people you’ve never met also have the key. Try to sleep tight. An expat Iranian couple definitely won’t when they check into a hotel with a 100% vacancy rate and a check-out time of maybe never in Kourosh Ahari’s The Night, which had its world premiere at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Babak and Neda’s marriage suffered while they were apart, but they have tried to make up for lost time after she joined him in America. They both take pride and delight in their baby, but there is still tension between them that always gets aggravated when Babak drinks. This is one of those nights (boy, is it ever). He is too proud to crash with their friends after the dinner party winds down, but Babak agrees to stop at a hotel when he gets a little too woozy during the drive back. Unfortunately, fate directs them to the wrong hotel.

It certainly is quiet, but that is because they are the only ones staying there. Yet, they are plagued by a mysterious prankster pounding on their door and crashing sounds coming from above the ceiling. Then weird time and spatial things start happening. They soon try to leave, but the hotel won’t let them.

It turns out Persian horror is a real thing and it is consistently good. Ana Lily Amanpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow are both superior films, but The Night can still hang in their company. Arguably, it could probably also be classified as “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or whatever critics are trying to call films like Eggers’ The Witch these days, but Ahari’s slow build eventually reaches some pretty malevolent and surreal heights.

SBIFF ’20: James vs. His Future Self

It is sort of like Looper, but the purpose of the time travel is love rather than contract killing. After years of research, James invented a process for time travel, but he had lost the love of his life long before that. Bitter over his life choices, the scruffy scientist uses his own method to try to convince his younger self to concentrate on the woman he loves instead in Jeremy LaLonde’s James vs. His Future Self, which screens during the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

James is intellectually brilliant, but an emotional idiot. Even though he is highly attracted to his co-worker friend Courtney, he is too consumed with his work to make any sort of advance. His older self will explain, in quite rough terms, what a mistake that is, but it is almost impossible to get through his younger self’s thick head. Nevertheless, the junior James agrees to finally act on his feelings, in order to make old bitter James (or “Uncle Jimmy” as he is forced to call him) go away. Initially, it all comes as a pleasant surprise to Courtney, who had largely given up on him. Unfortunately, the present-day James hasn’t really changed his obsessive, preoccupied ways yet.

LaLonde and co-screenwriter-co-star Jonas Chernick bring a fresh twist to time travel science fiction, even though they are not overly obsessed with the quantum mechanics of the space time continuum. Their focus is more on the personal, particularly James’ relationship with his older self. Most viewers would probably classify it as a time-travel rom-com, but it has a surprisingly bittersweet sensibility. It shares a kinship with The Wrong Todd (which could even be described as poignant at times), substituting time travel for parallel universes.