Night Moves – Review by David Turpin

Directed by: Kelly Reichardt

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fannning, Peter Sarsgaard

Night Moves, the fifth feature from Kelly Reichardt, might be read as the latest in a series of incremental steps toward the mainstream. Although Reichardt drew acclaim for her first feature, 1995’s River of Grass, her recent ascendancy to the top tier of American independent filmmaking has been marked by a gradual embrace of some of the more conventional cinematic pleasures, namely star performers (notably Michelle Williams in 2008’s Wendy and Lucy and 2010’s Meeks Cutoff) and genre stories (Wendy and Lucy is a muted girl-and-her-dog yarn, while Meek’s Cutoff is a Western boiled down to the bone). Night Moves boasts no fewer than three fully fledged film stars (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard), as well as Reichardt’s most genre-oriented story to date.

Eisenberg, Fanning and Sarsgaard play a trio of radical environmentalists, who set out to destroy a hydroelectric dam, using a boat (from which the film takes its title) loaded with explosives. Naturally, their plan goes awry – although to reveal exactly how would be unfair – and paranoia, recrimination and eventual violence ensue. Night Moves, then, is a kind of suspense drama, and it sees Reichardt deploying her signature style – involving long silences and the patient, meticulous accumulation of detail – to crueller ends than before. The film’s three set-piece suspense sequences combine “slow cinema” aesthetics with Hitchcockian tension – a marriage that pays off terrifically the first two times, but stumbles in a crucial climactic scene that won’t be spoiled here. Throughout, it’s the push and pull between the demands of the suspense genre and Reichardt’s distinctive observational style that makes Night Moves both compelling and occasionally perplexing – it’s a film that’s characterised by more than one kind of tension.

The performances are uniformly strong. Eisenberg is tightly coiled to the point of inscrutability, while Sarsgaard reprises his patented blend of sleaze and sanctimony. Fanning is terrifically assured at revealing the naivety beneath her character’s brittle hauteur, particularly in the film’s first half. However, she is ill-served by the second hour, which narrows its focus almost entirely to Eisenberg.

Meanwhile, Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography is exquisite, particularly in the autumnal outdoor scenes, which are captured with a piercing sense of reality. Blauvelt’s contribution is essential, as Reichardt is a filmmaker who says a lot with a single image: one particular shot, in which the protagonists’ boat drifts past a pair of small children playing with toy guns among tree stumps, balances metaphor and naturalism with tremendous elegance and economy.

Reichardt, like Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, occupies an unusual position, perched between observational naturalism and narrative-driven “movie” territory. In its blend of suspense and realism, Night Moves doesn’t quite achieve the power of the Dardennes’ 2005 film L’enfant, but it easily outclasses their recent Two Days, One Night, which boasts a fine turn by Marion Cotillard but feels synthetic and calculated in a way that Reichardt’s film does not – at least until its climactic showdown. Though this late swerve into melodrama threatens to undermine Night Moves, the film holds together, finally concluding on a chillingly ambiguous note that confirms Reichardt’s position as American cinema’s foremost practitioner of the tantalisingly open-ended sign off.