Creepy hotels are commonplace in the scary-movie pantheon, from Bates Motel in “Psycho” to the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining.” And LA’s Hotel Normandie, the setting for Iranian director Kourash Ahari’s unsettling “The Night,” certainly wouldn’t be out of place in their company, even if the film itself doesn’t quite live up to those heady expectations.
Husband and wife Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Noor) decide to spend the night there while driving home, with a baby in tow, from a dinner party with other Iranian immigrants. It seems Babak may have had a touch too much to drink, a fact that Neda is not shy about reminding him.
Of course, their outing was a bit of a disaster even before Babak’s GPS went haywire, forcing the two to call it a night and check into what has to be the least Yelp-ready hotel in California. Babak had a raging toothache while he and Neda had been sniping at each other for much of the evening, showing that if this isn’t a marriage in the process of unraveling, it’s certainly frayed around the edges.
A good night’s sleep would do them both a world of good, but that’s not what they’re going to get at Hotel Normandie, a fictionalized and presumably scarier version of the real Hotel Normandie in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles.
Unrated
Running time: 105 minutes
Where: Opens Jan. 29 at iPic Houston; Begins streaming Jan. 29 on various platforms
Language: Farsi and English, with English subtitles
***½ (out of 5)
From the strange homeless man outside to the odd hotel clerk (character actor George Maguire) who insists they have to take the suite because that’s all that’s left — when it’s clear this hotel hasn’t seen a paying guest since Ronald Reagan was governor — there are enough clues to suggest no one’s getting any sleep tonight. (And, really, if you don’t immediately turn around and walk out of such a hotel, when there are so many others close by in the heart of LA, then you fully deserve the fright-filled hours before sunrise that come next.)
Ahari, working from a script he wrote with Milad Jarmooz, is adept at ratcheting up the suspense, creating tension out of light, shadow and pounding knocks on the door. Hosseini and Noor, whose characters are on screen for nearly the entire 105-minute running time, anchor “The Night” in the reality of a couple at the end of their tether. (Hosseini is one of Iran’s best actors, having appeared in both “A Separation” and “The Salesman,” two of the country’s most notable films in recent years.)
The “Twilight Zone”-style ending might strike some as unsatisfying but, in many ways, it’s the right conclusion to what has come before. Yes, indeed it often is darkest before the dawn.
cary.darling@chron.com
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