Coming off a 19-year directing hiatus, after the much-maligned Angelina Jolie thriller “Original Sin,” writer/director Michael Cristofer’s newest film, “The Night Clerk,” is the type of amateurish inert sexual thriller that will, fortunately or not, end up forgotten in a pile of VOD releases. One that wastes a talented cast, including Ana de Armas, who, with “Knives Out” and the upcoming “No Time to Die,” will hopefully be moving out of these lazily typecast films sometime soon.
Staring, and produced by, Tye Sheridan (himself a gifted actor, stuck in a terrible role), who plays the alliteratively named Bart Bromley, the titular 23-year-old Night Clerk, who has both Asperger’s syndrome and a penchant for installing hidden cameras within the hotel rooms. Bart’s voyeurism, which he controls through a multi-screen computer in his mom’s basement, which his mom (Helen Hunt) seems to oddly know about, sets up the all too predictable plot, as he eventually witnesses a brutal murder of a woman, Karen (Jacque Gray). Hoping to remove his cameras before the police arrive, he finds himself a suspect when he is discovered in the hotel room, covered in blood.
With the murder comes John Leguizamo’s police detective, one who is both terrible at his job and has also seemingly never heard of Aspergers. Bart is eventually moved to a different hotel where he is followed by the police and meets the overly-friendly Andrea (de Armas), who takes a liking to Bart’s social awkwardness. That Andrea is seeing a married man and goes out of her way to spend time with Bart, including inviting him on a topless midnight swim, should tell you enough about her character and where the film is going. Yes, Bart eventually sets up cameras in her room and, of course, the two women are connected.
While “The Night Clerk” checks all the boxes of film noir, it never brings anything new or interesting to the genre. The plot, instead, cycles through the motions. Murder, followed by a detective himself set up for the crime, and the eventual comeuppance. Despite everyone involved, the film is amateurish, both in production and writing. Billed as a murder mystery, perhaps piggybacking off of Armas’ success in “Knives Out,” there is little mystery in ‘The Night Clerk.” Karen’s murderer is obvious. Hint: It’s not Bart.
Armas’s Andrea is an underdeveloped femme fatale, defined only by her sexuality. Are we supposed to believe that she is actually interested in Bart? Coming off such a successful reversal of tropes in Rian Johnson’s aforementioned film, Armas’s character here is given no interiority. What are her motives? It’s impossible to say, as Cristofer’s camera, and by extension Bart, reduce Andrea to an object.
Cristofer has been both successful as an actor and playwright (he played Phillip Price in “Mr. Robot” and won the Pulitzer Prize for his still moving play “The Shadow Box ” in 1977), yet “The Night Clerk” fits into a directing oeuvre that has been oddly lackluster. Sheridan and Armas are, unsurprisingly, good in their one-note roles, and will continue to star in bigger and better features. If anything, “The Night Clerk” will be a footnote on both of their resumes.
When the finale comes, in which it appears that Bart will go down for the murder, the obvious reversal is both unsurprising and, oddly, under-explained, leading into an ill-defined ending. In all, despite featuring an intriguing set-up and good cast, “The Night Clerk” offers nothing new to the genre, predictably hitting the same beats, without variation. [D]