2 out of 5

Directed by: Julius Ramsay

I find that flash-forwards that kick off a more limited, time-investment-wise, piece of media – meaning especially movies – are often very suspect devices. When you have sufficient pages or episodes to build back up to something, or if it occurs partway through a series when you’re already connected to that character in the flash-forward, you have a throughline: you’ve earned our interest, retro- or proactively. The only other way it really works is if that flash-forward is so out there that you’d be curious just knowing how so-and-so got into so-and-so situation (these setups often involving a swaggery voiceover, positing just that question to us).

Midnighters – already a rather troublingly bland title for a movie – opens with a flash-forward that is… unoriginal. We obviously don’t know this character yet, and even beyond being unoriginal – a character tied to a chair – it leans into women-in-danger tropes that were already quite tired by 2017, when this was made, and the further events leading back up to this moment don’t do anything to unseat judgments upon director / writer Julius / Alston Ramsay for applying these tropes.

Very suspect.

The woman is Lindsey (Alexandra Essoe); after the opening blip, we return to the New Years Eve work party she’s leaving, searching for her husband. Jeff (Dylan McTee) is outside, having ditched the party, and looking forward to going home. They’re each lightly buzzed; there’s discussion of money troubles, and having a better upcoming year. While he’s driving the two home, he cops a feel, and mumbles about the fun girl he used to know, taking his eyes off the road; it is no surprise, given movie rules, that the two end up hitting a man in the middle of the street.

While initially planning to bring the man to a hospital – secluded street; their phones get no reception; yadda yadda – he dies en route, and they pause to consider: what now? given that they’ve both had a couple drinks. They decide on the movie-logical next step: go home, wait to get sober, then go to the police. When they get home a realize the license plate of their car had come off in the accident – meaning it’s still lying in the street – it turns out to be the first of several escalating problems that night and the next day.

I don’t really take issue with predictable movies. Rare is the film that’s wholly unpredictable, and it’s about how you present that predictability, same as anything else. But Midnighters operates in a space where some worthwhile twists on the One Bad Night setup – perhaps there was a reason that man was out on that road in the middle of the night – are executed without any awareness of how they operate within an otherwise fully telegraphed film, and more top-down lack of awareness of how this movie plays in the 2010s, at least a couple decades of Criminal Minds and CSI past when its characters’ “decision making” has any plausibility.

Unmasked illogic and poor pacing of its surprises are then watered down by the aforementioned tropes – yeah, let’s get a pointless torture scene preceding that tied-to-the-chair moment – and the type of dialogue that only happens in movies, where villains soliloquize about astrological symbols. Again, all of this stuff is fine if your construction and presentation make it work, but that’s not this movie.

Julius Ramsay does take advantage of the mostly single setting in which the movie takes place, giving Jeff and Lindsey’s home an understandable sense of space but maintaining the claustrophobia needed for the setup. With cinematographer Alexander Alexandrov, a cool, blue tone is established that fits, and allows the low budget flick to look appreciably cinematic. But the limited character set requires a more deft hand to keep interesting, and the Ramsays (visually, and in the script) rely on scene cross-cutting that feels clunky, if the movie needed further strikes against its immersion.

Midnighters starts off stumbling. Some initial execution confidence and a fair setup never help things fully recover from that starting point, and the movie continues to stumble more along the way.