Cameron and Colin Cairnes summon demonic forces on a 1970s talk show, and the results are hellishly good in Late Night With the Devil.
David Dastmalchian stars as Jack Delroy, a television talk show host of Night Owls who has been going up against the legendary Johhny Carson every week for years and never managing to usurp the icon despite having a decent following of his own.
Life goes off the rails for Delroy when his wife passes away. Ratings have dropped and the quality of the show is in the toilet. With Sweeps Week nearing and Delroy’s show on the chopping block, he pulls out all the stops with a spooky Halloween night stunt.
And that stunt is parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell and her demon-infested subject, a young girl named Lilly. Delroy has set the Halloween edition of Night Owls up with a clairvoyant, a magician turned skeptic, and this double act in the hopes of stirring up something fantastical on live television, which, of course, works out, but maybe not how it was hoped.
The film is presented as a lost episode of the show, so it features the soft-focus cameras and 70s set design you’d expect with the typical talk-show formula replicated quite well. The Cairnes draw you into their unearthed time capsule convincingly, and it’s down to the doubleheader of excellent presentation and Dastmalchian’s believable performance as a 70s talk show host.
The Cairnes also draw from reality to create their fiction, with the Aussie directors citing Australian talk show The Don Lane Show as inspiration for the style of Night Owls, and guests in the film were modeled after particular guests on Don Lane’s show, including spoon-bender-in-chief Uri Geller.
For much of Late Night With the Devil’s runtime, it playfully flits between belief and skepticism. The clairvoyant kicks things off with a display that initially seems to be very hacky and firmly closed to debate on its authenticity, but at the end of his opening segment, something odd happens to make us question just how genuine his act is.
Smartly, this cycle of cynicism and sincerity escalates after each ad break (which sees us get black-and-white ”behind the scenes” moments rather than ads). The choice of guests feels ever more weighted towards creating a particular kind of drama, and even when you think Late Night With the Devil might have played its hand a bit too soon, it comes roaring back with a (literally) mesmerizing breakdown scene that is arguably the film at its best.
David Dastmalchian’s troubled host elevates Late Night with the Devil because he buys into what he’s doing in such a way that it’s infectious. It would be so easy to do a caricature of a talk show host, but Jack Delroy is uncannily evocative of the ones of that era in terms of cadence, controlled movements, and unnerving ability to shift from sincerity to sarcasm when called upon without coming across as an erratic prick.
Perhaps the only thing detracting from the spectacle is some CGI stands out for the wrong reasons and momentarily dragged me out of the experience. Sure, as the film ascends into its chaotic finale, you could also end up feeling that way there too, but at least then it has shifted from the previous formula enough to warrant a discordant break from reality.
I’m very fond of found footage and the many ways it can be interpreted, so what Late Night With the Devil does made it instantly endearing to me. I like the implications of the real imapct of this quite public ”lost” episode of a talk show. The potentially immersion-breaking, ”But why don’t we remember it if it went live?” question is answered with cheeky confidence, and I think it’s easy to miss that at first in the whirwind nature of the film’s final third. It really shines in a found footage capacity when it takes peeks behind the curtain (or during commercials in this case) and lets you in on what the public wouldn’t have seen.
There’s layers to Late Night With the Devil. That’s not to say it’s some great philospohical piece, but it gives you an entertaining thrill ride upfront and tucks away its subtleties for your brain to discover after or indeed on a rewatch. Like feeding a cat its medicine by putting it inside a ball of cheese.
As a horror fan, Late Night With the Devil slots into that sweet spot of feeling like a comfy ghost house perfect for yearly Halloween watching, but also has enough substance to make it more than a seasonal novelty.
Score: 8/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 8 equates to ”Great”. While there are a few minor issues, this score means that the art succeeds at its goal and leaves a memorable impact.
Screener of Late Night With the Devil provided for review.
Late Night with the Devil is in theaters on March 22, 2024.
