Movie Review - The Night Clerk (2020)

Michael Cristofer is a 75-year-old writer who is probably best known for his play, The Shadow Box (1977), which won the Tony Award for Best Play and also won him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That play was about people dealing with certain, medical conditions, debilitating or deadly, medical conditions. This theme would show up, not frequently, but in a few other of his works, including Mr. Jones (1993) with Richard Gere and HBO's Gia (1998) with Angelina Jolie, a film he also directed. For almost 20 years though, Cristofer hasn't done much writing or directing. He's done acting in various TV shows. His most recent acting role was in the TV series Mr. Robot, which is about a computer hacker who's dealing with a medical condition, several medical conditions in fact. I suppose it should come to no surprise that his first feature as writer-director in nearly two decades is again about a man dealing with a medical condition.

Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One and X-Men: Apocalypse) stars as Bart Bromley who has Asperger syndrome. Asperger's is considered a form of autism or is on the autism spectrum. It's mainly a person who has trouble with social interaction and communication. Unlike other forms of autism, which cause people to be more shy, Bart can engage and talk to people. When he does so, he's usually very awkward, not able to make eye-contact or express proper facial gestures. He can also be very verbal, rattling off data like the android Data from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. People are off-put by him, which results in him not having too many friends. He lives with his mother but prefers to be in the basement, alone.

He does have a job. He works at the front desk of a hotel. Yet, his hours are in the evening and late into the early morning, from 8 PM to 4 AM. It's not clear what town or city he lives, but it feels mostly suburban. Therefore, his late shift means that he doesn't really interact that much with people, so he's basically alone at work as well. He wants to be able to interact with people or interact with people better. He wants to be normal as it were, so he likes to study people. The opening of this film has him doing so at the local shopping mall where he'll stare at the crowds as they walk past him. However, he has a more insidious method of studying people. He places hidden cameras in the hotel rooms of his guests, which he can use to spy on them from his laptop, as well as from his computer at home. He basically commits a serious invasion of privacy.

Ana de Armas (Knives Out and Blade Runner 2049) co-stars as Andrea Rivera, one of the guests at Bart's hotel. Not much is known about her, except that she says that she's seeing a married man at the hotel for a secret rendezvous. She also says that she had a brother who had a similar but worse condition to Bart. She says her brother ended up dying after being institutionalized. It's clear that Bart starts to develop romantic feelings for her, but she doesn't reciprocate those feelings. It doesn't stop Bart from spying on her in her hotel room.

The inciting incident is a murder that occurs in one of the hotel rooms on which Bart is spying. It seems very similar to the premise of Sliver (1993) or yet another version of Rear Window (1954). In Rear Window, the man who was doing the spying wasn't accused of committing the crime. In Sliver though, the man doing the spying did have some suspicion that he could be the killer. Here, that idea is only dramatic irony because we know that Bart didn't commit the crime but thanks to his cameras, he did witness the crime. He even tried to stop it by going to the hotel room, which is what causes people to suspect him of being the killer.

John Leguizamo (Ice Age and Moulin Rouge!) also co-stars as Detective Espada, a police detective at the unnamed police department. He's the one who investigates the murder at the hotel. He knows that Bart is lying and hiding information about the crime, namely that Bart has cameras in the rooms. Espada tries to get at the truth, but he's frustrated at Bart's reticence to tell the whole truth. He also gets grief from Bart's mother, played by Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets and Twister).

Yes, Bart is in the center of this murder mystery, but it doesn't seem like Bart has any interest in solving the crime. When we see him looking at the surveillance video, it's not clear at first that the video captured the face of the killer. Later though, it's revealed that his video did capture the face of the killer. The film just chooses not to reveal it to the audience till the very end. Therefore, the mystery isn't a mystery to Bart. He knows the whole time. He's just choosing not to reveal it, even when Espada is openly accusing him.

Ana de Armas was just in Knives Out, which is a way more successful, murder mystery. She was more the center of that story. It was multi-layered where her character was in a similar position as Bart is here. That story though did a better job of making her character not want to reveal what she knows to the police. Bart's motivation not to go to the police isn't as well done. I'm not sure the film really lets us into Bart's head all that much. It's not even through his mother that we get that much backstory to inform us of Bart's previous experiences with friends from school or possible previous girlfriends. Bart's character instead remains rather hollow.

Rated R for language, some sexual references, brief nudity and violent images.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 30 mins.

Available on VOD.