Alone at Night is a new horror film directed by Jimmy Giannopoulos.  The Signature Entertainment release is currently streaming on digital platforms.

This film is an odd duck.  It’s not so much that it doesn’t know what genre it wants to be in as it can’t find a satisfactory relationship between the several genres it locates itself in.

The storyline concerns Vicky (Ashley Benson), a cam-girl who is plying her trade on a website called ’18 and Over’ while staying at a secluded cabin in the woods.  Meanwhile, a serial killer has been conducting a reign of terror in the city.  His MO is to kill people close to (geographically as well as emotionally) a cam-girl he has fallen for and reasons has betrayed him culminating with the girl herself.  His murder weapon is a crowbar he drives through the victim’s ear (ouch!).

From the synopsis, this sounds like a common or garden slasher meets home invasion effort.  However the film’s violence is too tame for it to properly qualify for this genre.  The film would dearly like to be a treatise on modern relationships with a murder mystery backdrop.  However, its insights aren’t that penetrating or interesting and the mystery elements aren’t clever or suspenseful enough to be really satisfying.  

 Alone at Night works well in some ways.  The murky night photography aids suspense and some of the jump scares land.  The characters are well-defined and mostly well-written.  As Vicky Ashley Benson is likeable and vulnerable.  The ubiquity of cam work and the number of women creating content for OnlyFans means that this type of sex worker is an acceptable POV lead in a mainstream film.  The movie may be congratulating itself on this ‘edgy’ choice but a peculiar form of reticence is evident.  A friend of Vicky (Sky Ferreira) in the same line of work tells her “Show a little ass.  You have nice tits” in order to get more money.  Vicky may roll around semi naked in weird lingerie and masturbate in her bath while wearing a purple wig for the delectation of her clients but she always has strips of gaffer tape strategically and tastefully covering her nipples.  So we know our girl is still respectable. The casting of Paris Hilton (as a reality TV host) and Pamela Anderson (as a local sheriff) is a shrewd move.  Both women remind viewers of the duration and reach of a certain kind of glossy commodified sexuality that online sex workers like Vicky also exploit.

The movie has a not entirely committed aspiration towards being a meta-narrative.  Vicky and a couple of her love interests watch ‘Trap Stars’, a Covid set Big Brother / Love Island variant hosted by Hilton playing herself and it seems some vague message is intended about modern voyeurism (reality TV, online titillation, sensationalistic violence) but it is not clear quite what. 

In spite of some definite strengths Alone at Night is a movie that does not properly integrate its ambitions and the meta aspects only serve to confuse the viewer and take them out of the action.