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Chloe lives with her daughter Sophia. After losing her husband, she runs a motel on her own in a godforsaken place. To earn a little extra money, she turns a blind eye to the prostitutes and drugs circulating in her motel. Until social services demand she leave the establishment within two weeks, or risk having her daughter taken away. Nothing compared to the abyss she finds herself in after the arrival of the "courier" Topo (Bryan Cranston).
Embracing the bleak and dreary atmospheres of the splendid noir "Winter's Bone" by Debra Granik, the unknown Tze Chun delivers to the cinematic world a genre film that has gone entirely under the radar, especially in our Italy, always excellent at concealing anything that doesn't guarantee box office success, well-supported by a film audience among the most gullible and naive in the European landscape. "Cold Comes the Night" is a good old-fashioned noir, certainly not a masterpiece, nor one of those films that reinvents the genre, but it's unclear why titles like this can't find distribution in our country. Just consider the travails experienced by Hillcoat's "The Road," which had to wait a year from its American release (which was already postponed) to see the light. "Too depressing," they said.
Ending the rant against Italian distribution, we return to the decadent atmospheres of Chun's work, constantly balancing between family drama, poverty report, micro-criminal report, thriller, and noir. Without trying to be a phenomenon, Chun sticks to an essential and smooth direction, leaving aside various sophisms and complicated camera movements. His "invisible" style adapts to the modulations of a film that lives on images and sensations, leaving words aside, also because the script (also the work of the same director) is the weakest part of the whole. Some characters are not properly characterized, some plot twists seem forced or at least implausible, and the viewer must accept certain situations that make them raise an eyebrow. While the mother/daughter relationship is overly dramatized, this also serves the director to justify the "warrior" Chloe, ready to fight not to lose her little one.
Chun tells us a story of drugs and poverty in deep American provinces, where there is no justice except "personal" justice, where there is no law (ambiguous and then rotten is the figure of the cop Billy), where there is no wealth. What remains is the hope of turning the page, but one must act to do so. Chloe acts because she is driven by nervousness first, fear later. In these desolate lands where the American dream never existed, Chun brings to the screen the last crumbs of lost dignity in a film that in its second half plummets towards pure thriller and pulls no punches with gut punches and sudden twists.
A small low-budget production that, even more than its intrinsic value, should be noted as an episode of that "genre" undergrowth that still does not give up and does not succumb to the ultra-productions that are bringing Cinema to death (or it would be better to say suicide...)
"Why are you doing it? Because it's hard to find good assistants..."
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