Late Night with the Devil

★★★★

Television is always trying to push something. Commercials sell products; news networks peddle ideas and social beliefs; episodic programming encourages us to, well, keep watching TV. “Late Night with the Devil” imagines a fictional late-night program in which, during its fateful Halloween special in 1977, the thing TV was pushing was evil itself.

In brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ indie horror-thriller, David Dastmalchian plays a likeable late-night host whose program, Night Owls with Jack Delroy, has dramatically dipped in viewership. In an effort to regain popularity, the show’s annual Halloween special is revamped to feature three distinct guests thematically linked by their ties to the supernatural. There’s the psychic Christou, whose method of speaking to deceased relatives of audience members feels scammy at best, until it sharply doesn’t. There’s Carmichael the Conjurer, a former magician skeptical of the paranormal, who offers a $100 million check to anyone who can definitively prove the mystical as genuine. And then there’s the program’s centrepiece: an interview with parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell, who brings along her subject, a possessed teenage cult-survivor named Lilly, who is encouraged by Delroy to channel the devil on live TV. Presented as found footage of a long-since-seen television broadcast that shocked the nation, “Late Night with the Devil” holds its focus on Delroy, who struggles to maintain his composure as his nighttime program slowly slips off the rails into something uniquely sinister and altogether evil.

The horror is really in the anticipation of horror. The film’s framing device informs us by its very nature that something must go horribly awry by the end of this program, so it is in essence a film of dreaded, suspenseful waiting for the shoe to drop. There are, of course, numerous scares and disturbing images throughout — the anxiety builds through these unsettling instances, rather than being reset by them — and the film does a tremendous job marrying the Satanic terror elements with its seventies-television setting. Meaning, much of the film’s fright and discomfort comes specifically from sources exclusive to broadcast TV in that era. Jump-scares spliced into frame-by-frame playback, electrical outages that crackle into static “we’ll be right back” interstitials, stuff of that sort.

But when the film does lean into more traditional sources of low-budget horror, like graphic gore effects and body horror imagery, it lands with that much more shock. The film employs a fair bit of digital effects (some of which are more convincing than others) but some effects are created practically, and these ones stick out as especially impressive. One moment, so graphic I quite literally covered my eyes at points, is pulled off with wonderful artistry and prosthetic mastery. The visual creativity and inventiveness extends to the art direction as well. The film’s single location, the studio where Night Owls is taped, feels ripped right out of the seventies, with era-appropriate furnishings and decor. It’s enormously transportive, even beyond the retro manner in which it is captured, and I only wish I could credit the artists behind the film with all of its immersive visual qualities.

Yes, a few short days before the film’s wide release, it was reported that many of the bumper cards featured in the program’s ad-breaks were created by artificial intelligence software. In the film, they accumulate to little more than ten seconds of screen-time, but pause to look at any one of them and it won’t take long to notice the wonky illogical hallmarks of AI “art.” However, this is not the full extent to which AI was used as replacement for real artists in this film, as the Night Owls logo that adorns the huge sliding doors in the centre of Jack Delroy’s set, as well as on other items around his studio, was also evidently made using the same AI software. The use of artificial intelligence in art, stripping away the job of real graphic designers and artists, particularly by a low-budget independent film, is reprehensible. It spits in the face of artists, in the face of art as a concept, and entirely opposes the genuine 70s era aesthetic the filmmakers were striving for. “Late Night with the Devil” sets a very dangerous precedent for the film and television industry. If this is allowed here, with minimal to no repercussions, next time it’ll be done by a major studio, and it’ll be a script, or an actor’s performance, or an entire film churned out by a machine. Artificial intelligence poses the greatest threat this industry has ever seen, and Cameron and Colin Cairnes gladly helped it along.

Within the context of this film, however, the damage is minimal. The images are few, they are infrequently shown, and very little of the film’s worth rests on these short moments. There has been talk of boycotting the film, which is your prerogative as, ultimately, we vote with our wallets. But for me, it was a minimal detractor in an otherwise excellent film. Perhaps my feelings will change if “Late Night with the Devil” ends up being the starting gun for a dystopian age of AI-run media devoid of human creatives. But I doubt it.

The real detractors in “Late Night with the Devil” are more glaring inconsistencies in the film’s framing.  This is all, supposedly, a documentary with found footage of a “real” broadcast. Why, you may ask, do three or four cameramen seemingly go rogue during commercial breaks to film behind-the-scenes footage of Delroy and his studio team? Fantastic question. How do they always manage to be in the exact right spot? What are we to make of the dramatic break of the form when the film enters a trippy dream-sequence? There are no logical answers to these questions, and it’d be easier to just roll with it if the film didn’t hold so tight to its convictions. If you want extensive scenes backstage and sequences in our main character’s mind, perhaps the found footage format is a poor fit. And then there’s the film’s ending. Enormously entertaining, deeply haunting, unshakeably memorable. Also, a tad unsatisfying.

But the film is really held up in all its respects by David Dasmalchian. A longtime character actor who has appeared in nearly everything in the past few years but has never been given his time in the spotlight, Dastmalchian proves his talent in a charming, subtle, chilling performance, and everything that works about the film orbits around his gravitational pull. He’s extraordinary, and this should be a star-making vehicle for him. He plays Jack Delroy’s drive for success with suitable restraint and hungry desperation, and ultimately that is what this film is about. The pursuit of success, how far some will go to get it. It is a parable on the price of fame and fortune, of being on top, and a warning to be careful what you wish for. Throw in some demon possession, evil black goo and ritualistic Satanic cults, and you’ve got yourself a pretty entertaining night of TV.