Gone In The Night: Review

18th July 2022

Kath (Winona Ryder) and Max (John Gallagher Jr.) are going to spend the weekend away together when they come to their cabin in the woods. However, inside they find another couple, Greta (Brianne Tju) and Al (Owen Teague) who are also planning to spend the night.

Coming to a compromise, the couples decide to stay together and get to know each other and before they know it, they are happily playing board games.

Unfortunately, after a while, Kath finds Al crying and he tells her that Max and Greta have run off together. So, Kath does the thing that any woman was jilted would do – she goes back to her job as a florist and forgets it ever happens. That is until she meets Nicholas (Dermot Mulroney), a mysterious stranger and she becomes convinced that something is wrong and that she should go and find her ex.

Gone in The Night (or The Cow in other territories) is a thriller directed by Eli Horowitz and co-written by Matthew Derby. Put in a familiar setting of a cabin in the woods, the savvier audience members must immediately be put on edge.

They know that something is going to happen, but the seemingly ordinary situation may momentarily put them at ease. It also seems to put Kath’s mind to rest as well, as what is billed as a thriller takes a decidedly relaxed approach to the promise of a tense story. However, once Kath comes to her senses then she follows handsome stranger Nicholas as they get closer to the truth.

Gone in The Night does this by playing with the structure of the story, inserting flashbacks when needed and giving its audience routes to follow to where they could draw their own conclusions.

The trouble is that a lot of those scenes are seemingly there to pad out the story, making the shocking reveal feel more of a misdirect and outright lie rather than a clever subversion of expectations. Gone in The Night has some great performances, particularly from Ryder, but ultimately the audience may feel cheated by the ambiguous and outlandish finale.

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