Red Nights

A seriously strange little movie, Red Nights details the violence that ensues after an opportunistic woman (Frédérique Bel’s Catherine) attempts to scam a terrifyingly sadistic psychopath (Carrie Ng’s Carrie). Red Nights opens with an incredibly striking sequence, in which a young woman steps into one of Carrie’s bizarre torture devices (voluntarily!), that certainly proves effective at immediately grabbing the viewer’s attention, with Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud’s consistently captivating directorial choices going a long way towards perpetuating the film’s impressively moody atmosphere. It’s worth noting that by the time the movie segues into its cat-and-mouse battle between Carrie and Catherine, which isn’t quite as enthralling as one might’ve liked, Red Nights has certainly succeeded in confounding the viewer’s expectations at every turn (ie there’s really never a point at which one is able to easily figure out just where all this is going). The watchable yet far-from-engrossing atmosphere eventually gives way to a spellbindingly brutal interlude that surely stands as the film’s centerpiece, with the strength of this sequence unfortunately ensuring that everything that comes after it feels somewhat anticlimactic. The final showdown, which essentially plays out like a conventional shootout in an abandoned building, is especially disappointing, yet it’s not enough to diminish what is otherwise a memorable and thoroughly twisted piece of work.

*** out of ****