Night Always Comes Review: Good-ish Time

Despite a strong Vanessa Kirby performance and a ticking clock narrative, Night Always Comes feels like it’s holding back something deeper.

It’s a mostly standard-issue streaming exclusive featuring a couple good performances but lacks staying power as we head into awards and fall film festival season.

For all her work in blockbuster films like Fantastic Four: First Steps and the Mission: Impossible franchise, Vanessa Kirby has shown she has the acting chops to headline indies as well and, if nothing else, Night Always Comes further solidifies this. Economic anxieties lie at the heart of Caron’s film, as Lynette (Kirby) has one night to secure $25,000, or she’ll lose her childhood home in Portland along with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her disabled brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen).

The film begins with few hiccups, as Doreen is set to meet Lynette and sign papers and make the financing official, but Doreen swerves unexpectedly and buys a car instead. Sarah Conradt’s screenplay hints at some mental health issues prevalent in Doreen, but they’re mostly left unexplored; if anyone but Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s made a career out of portraying mentally unstable women, had played the part, it would have likely fallen flat immediately and felt like a simple plot contrivance.

From here, the film shifts into a kind of riff on films like Good Time or Two Days, One Night, as Lynette tries to use any of her outstanding connections to get the rest of the money. Caron visualizes the passage of time with a literal clock on screen as the night goes on, which helps to sell the walls closing in around her. It’s revealed that, despite working a day job at a bread factory and a night shift at a bar, Lynette has a still-ongoing gig as a kind of escort, and she first reaches out to Scott (Randall Park), a regular customer. He throws her a few bones, but it’s not nearly enough, and Lynette is on to her next stop.

Night Always Comes uses this episodic setup not just to introduce us to the increasingly shady personalities from Lynette’s past and present, but to show how the relatively stable lifestyle she’s built up can so quickly come crashing down. As expected, Kirby shines, even when the film eventually loses sight of making her an interesting character; her status as one of the film’s producers shows her commitment to the film’s vision. There never comes a point when she has to make an impossible choice, or make a personal sacrifice, in order to make up the difference in cash.

One interesting interlude sees Lynette visit Gloria (Julia Fox, showing that Uncut Gems wasn’t just a fluke), an old friend and fellow call girl who’s hit the big time by being the favorite mistress of a senator. For this brief scene, Night Always Comes hints at the lengths some women must go to in order to get ahead, but the introspection stops there. Indeed, on the surface, Gloria has everything that Lynette wants, including a penthouse apartment and trips across the country, but Lynette has too many people depending on her to live that lifestyle. Even the film’s setting of Portland, one of America’s most gentrified cities with a troubling number of un-housed people, feels like just the beginning of a thoughtful statement.

Thankfully the film is saved by a final twist, which I won’t spoil here, but speaks to the loss of Lynette’s soul as the night goes on. The end product rises above most of the current Netflix drek, and deserves more than being unceremoniously dumped on the platform, but will likely be forgotten before long. Caron’s previous film, Sharper, fell into similar territory as being a well-acted but formulaic genre exercise for AppleTV+, and Night Always Comes feels like a slightly more memorable experience.

Night Always Comes will be available to stream globally on Netflix from August 15, 2025.