'Night of Deception' Review
Release Date: --/--/-- [Festival Run]
Genre: Drama. Thriller.
MPAA: Not Rated.
The Verdict: A Maybe
Small-budget, one-location thrillers exist for a reason, and you can tell from the first scene that this movie was made with love, focus, and the best of intent. Director and producer Julian Iliev’s Night of Deception is that kind of film, and it is here to make a statement.
The movie starts with two storylines running in parallel until they collide. Lucas and Julia are a married couple whose relationship faces a crisis of faith. Tyson is a wounded young man on the run from a riot taking place in the city. He seeks shelter in the wealthy couple’s house, and an intense bond forms between those three unlikely people.
One of the movie's biggest flaws is the score; it really needs to be toned down. At times, I struggled to immerse myself in the film's mood because of the serpentine, ever-shifting score, from hard guitar riffs that unfortunately break the tense mood that the director is trying to create with his picture to sentimental guitar strokes that feel mushy and break the element of surprise that is supposed to be the pillar on which the entire narrative is built.
Another problem is the handheld camera getting so shaky that it's hard to concentrate. Tilted angles show the chaos and the terrible state the characters are in, and it’s not really a prohibited artistic choice, but at the hands of a more adept filmmaker it might have had a better purpose; here, it adds to the sense of dizziness and disorientation that many elements of the film contribute to. Credits should be given, though, to the light and shadow work, which effectively makes every character complicit in the chaos that rises, whether inside the characters or outside in the street.
The writing also seems to unload a couple of themes at once. One-location thrillers, relationship dramas, and social advocacy are all thrown in the blender together to create this work of art. It doesn’t work out as intended. Maybe if the writing had focused on one main storyline, pushing the others to the sidelines. It must be noted, however, that this is Iliev’s feature directorial debut, and from what we are seeing here, his future as a filmmaker is promising and guaranteed to achieve massive success.
Night of Deception is a less traumatic take on the first conflict in The Purge. It’s external tension vs. internal tension and domestic bliss standing the test of extramarital threats and home invasion scares.
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