Night Call Film Review: One Tense Night

Night Call is a propulsive action thriller that’s uninterested in examining the political underpinnings its story relies on.

Naive as Mady is, he stays there until a brutish and aggressive man shows up and immediately attacks him. After a violent – and exceptionally well staged – struggle, Mady kills the man, but two more guys show up and take him with them.

As it turns out, there were a million euros stashed away in the apartment Mady unknowingly helped Claire break into. With her long gone, the group of gangsters led by Yannick (Romain Duris, of The Animal Kingdom) blame Mady for the money’s disappearance, and they want it back. That he killed one of them doesn’t help his case either. But they are willing to humor him, and if he manages to get both the money and the girl (whose real name is obviously not Claire) back by the end of the night, they will leave him alone. And so begins a hunt across Brussels and its nightlife.

All of this is set against the backdrop of protests and civil unrest, but one of the movie’s biggest missteps is that it doesn’t do anything meaningful with this setting, which seems to primarily exist to create easy obstacles, and guide the plot. Since the police are busy dealing with the protests, they can’t help Mady when he tries to call them. During chase scenes, parts of the city are conveniently blocked by the demonstrations, and no matter how late into the night it gets, there are always huge crowds of people to hide between.

It’s disappointing that writers Michiel Blanchart and Gilles Marchand didn’t do more with such a perfect set up. If you’re telling the story of an innocent Black man who’s wrongfully accused of a crime against the backdrop of a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of police brutality, you should really find a way to connect those elements in a more effective way thematically. As it is, they are almost entirely separated except when it’s a useful tool for the screenwriters to keep the story going.

Having said that, as a simple action thriller, Night Call is quite effective. In large part, that is because the action here is shot practically, and you can feel it. Car crashes, fistfights, and the occasional fall from a building all have a real impact on the viewer. It’s clear that director Michiel Blanchart and his team know how to shoot an action scene. Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe’s camera creates dynamic movements to accentuate the big beats of a fight. And the long takes help both the well-choreographed action as well as the quieter moments of tension.

The sound design by Fabrice Grizard is similarly fantastic in Night Call. In an early interrogation scene, Mady’s head is wrapped in gaffer tape. The sound of the environment is dampened while his struggling breath and the squeaking tape on his face are brought into the foreground, which only increases the anxiety and tension of the scene. This kind of stylized sound design that plays with the subjective experience of its characters is found all throughout the film, making us feel the same stress Mady must be under.

On that note, Jonathan Feltre gives a very strong performance as Mady, a young man whose naivety and innocence bring him into an unjustly difficult situation. Over the course of the film, he’s forced into actions that nobody (including himself) would think he’s capable of, all the while attempting to keep his humanity intact. We see him breaking down at the thought of having to torture someone and wrestling with the kill from the beginning of the film. And so much of that happens in Jonathan Feltre’s face.

Despite all of that, there’s a final beat in his character towards the very end that doesn’t work. Even if Jonathan Feltre gives it everything he has, the script is not there to support this development in his character. And that’s the big thing keeping Night Call back from being truly great. The film has plenty of ideas. There’s the BLM protest happening in the background. Or the innocent core of Mady’s character that he fights to maintain in the face of darkness. Even the ex-girlfriend that is mentioned twice, but seems to be immediately forgotten the moment a scene passes. And so Night Call had all the elements to craft a special new entry into the thriller genre, but because it couldn’t figure out how to coherently put all these ideas together in a way that would make them matter, it’s just another technically well-executed action crime thriller.

Night Call was released in US theaters and on VOD on January 17, 2025.

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