Take the Night (2022) - Review
Wealthy and flamboyant William (Roy Huang) foolishly decides to throw a surprise birthday party for his conservative brother Robert's (Sam Song Li) 25th birthday. Unfortunately for William and the unwitting Robert, the staged abduction gets real.
"Take the Night" Writer, director and star Seth McTigue models the restrained and relatable plight of these desperate characters seeking out desperate measures to break the shackles of their station. Rather than malice, their experience reminded me of that visceral parable about the brutality that promotes cannibalistic rats that Javier Bardem's Silva uses to provoke Daniel Craig's James Bond.
According to McTigue, as he was developing "Take The Night" with his filmmaking collaborators, the idea of a fake kidnapping gone wrong was the most resonant and ripe for exploration. McTigue and their collaborators see the potential in this blindspot - elder millennials have adopted all the wrong lessons from David Fincher's "The Game".
Despite being set in New York, with views of the Manhattan skyline glimpsed by McTigue and his crew are carefully contained. "Take the Night" superbly captures the lo-fi tradecraft from the team. A work car must be stolen, and the unit must acquire disguises. McTigue takes his time, and it feels earned.
The highlights in the cast are Antonio Aaron and Brennan Keel Cook. Solemn is fastidious and wounded; Aaron's Justin, a fraternal brother to Chad (McTigue), gives some of the most impactful moments in the film in his limited minutes. A war veteran with crippling PTSD has come floundering back to the real world. He's reoriented by falling in line and following orders, no matter how corrosive the toll.
A grating and incessant blusterer, Brennan Keel Cook's Todd adds a bit of James Ransone's Ziggy from "The Wire" seasoning to the harmony of this crew. But, to Todd, his ingenuity is suffocated by his brother Chad's caution. Everything about this exercise is a game. The stakes for his crewmates, particularly Shomari Love's Shannon, living on the ragged edge, seem lost to him.
"Take the Night" is ultimately about brotherhood. Weirdly, each older brother has created a right of passage for their younger sibling, an attempt to transition to manhood - based on how they define it. For William, he thinks that Robert needs wholesale disorientation, a total loss of control to be looser. For Chad, utilising Todd in the heist, bringing him closer to the stark reality of the high-stakes robbery, means for him to grow up.
Both older brothers' folly is that their relationship, interactions, and precise reactions to the other's behaviour are one of the most significant contributors to why they are the way they are. This stress test doesn't fuse them in the ways they'd expect; instead, it underscores who they are for better or worse, and in the case of "Take the Night", worse.
Psychologist Jean Piaget concluded that even though you grow up in the same house, eat the same meals, have the same parents and occupy the same space - the adults you become are equally forged in your environment as in your experience.
"Take the Night" is a concertina, a family crime drama of second chances, worth a look to see if they're secured or squandered.
Blake Howard is a writer, film critic, podcast host and producer behind One Heat Minute Productions, which includes shows One Heat Minute, The Last 12 Minutes Of The Mohicans, Increment Vice, All The President’s Minutes, Miami Nice and Josie & The Podcats. Endorsed and featuring legendary filmmaker Michael Mann, One Heat Minute was named by New York Magazine and Vulture as one of 100 Great Podcasts To Listen To and nominated for an Australian Podcast Award. Creator of the Australian film collective Graffiti With Punctuation, Blake is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic with bylines in Empire Magazine, SBS Movies, Vague Visages, Dark Horizons, Film Ink and many more.