Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The Night Of Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 18, 2016

It’s not immediately obvious how subversive The Night Of turns out to be. After all, all of the tried and true tropes of a murder mystery are at play virtually from the get go (or at least from the end of the first episode). A seemingly sweet and inexperienced college student named Naz (Riz Ahmed) is amazed when he’s asked to a party being held by the basketball team (the kid is obviously a nerd, since his only reason for being there is that he tutors some of the players), a party guaranteed to have lots of pretty young women attending. When his buddy flakes on providing a drive to the bacchanal, Naz fights the pangs of conscience he’s obviously experiencing and decides to “borrow” his father’s out of service taxi. Through a probably contrived but still somehow organic feeling series of events, Naz actually ends up picking up a ride, a young woman named Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black D’Elia). The two rather quickly develop a rapport, and instead of going to the party, Naz spends the evening getting to know Andrea, culminating in a one night stand back at her place. Having been plied with a few illicit substances, Naz awakes in something of a stupor and is horrified to discover the lifeless body of Andrea, one covered in copious amounts of blood and showing signs of having been repeatedly stabbed or bludgeoned. He of course freaks out and tries to simply get back to his “safety zone” of his parents’ house, but fate intervenes, and he’s arrested. Naz’s naivete has already been well documented, but the kid, perhaps too eager to blend in as a Pakistani-American, makes a few strategic errors at the police station, errors exacerbated by the fact that supposed evidence linking him to the murder is found. Probably too late for his own good Naz realizes he needs the help of an attorney, which is when a kind of hapless lawyer named John Stone (John Turturro) enters the picture. Things seem to be set for a “did he or didn’t he?” scenario that would, if tradition held, finally resolve itself into the innocent camp, after some stunning late development suddenly threw new light on the whole crime. The Night Of instead only ups the ambiguity as it goes along, though, contravening the very procedural approach it’s supposedly exploiting. With an attorney who repeatedly reprimands his client about telling the truth and who states he needs to remain “flexible” in how he presents their “version” of the story to the jury, it’s obvious that The Night Of may end up playing fast and loose with at least some elements of the whole whodunit genre.

Despite its innovative qualities, The Night Of has certain elements that may remind some viewers of other properties. The whole scenario of an accused being too inebriated to remember salient details about a crime (whether or not he actually committed it) is quite similar to the interesting film River, and the fact that John Stone suffers from a debilitating case of eczema may remind some, at least tangentially, of The Singing Detective (though no one breaks into a song and dance routine during this often quite dour enterprise). There’s a wonderful sense of paranoia that creeps into the film early on, something else that links it to River, whose hero is in a foreign land trying to make sense not just of his predicament but of “simpler” things like customs and languages. Naz may be a born and bred American (in one of the first telling signs of how Stone sees his client, he quizzes him on potential future baseball Hall of Famers), but he’s still obviously an outsider, something that continues to play into the cross cultural ambience of the series.

Without getting into too many of the twists and turns The Night Of takes, what’s continually visceral about this enterprise is both its depiction of the grinding wheels of justice, something that includes some dogged police work by a cop named Dennis Box (Bill Camp), as well as the equally at times lethargic methodologies and strategies of the “order” camp in that old Law & Order formulation, i.e., the prosecuting attorneys and the defense team. Naz’s predicament actually starts getting press coverage and assorted hangers on arrive who challenge (successfully, at least for a while) John’s taking of the case. But there’s similarly intense (maybe more intense, actually) content regarding Naz’s “education” behind bars, something that brings him under the aegis of another jailmate named Freddy (Michael Kenneth Williams). Finally, Naz’s relationship(s) with his family provide a rather deep emotional tether that runs through every episode in some form or fashion.

Some of The Night Of seems overly “arty” at times, with long establishing shots of things like jail doors, or quasi-hallucinatory elements where Naz relives some of the events of the evening that led to his dire straits. The whole eczema angle also seems to be offering up some kind of pointed allegory, but its meaning frankly escaped me personally. Balancing that is the workmanlike accounts of our nation’s court system, something that may ultimately create as much angst in some viewers as the actual murder at the core of the story. Through it all, a large and colorful cast provide fantastic performances, none more so than Turturro, who really breathes life and a sort of wizened jaded quality into John Stone. Lots of murder mysteries of course give way to the iconic “Moishe the Explainer” moment, when all is revealed and the puzzle pieces fall neatly into place. Ironically, it seems for a while that The Night Of is building to such a moment, especially with a couple of late denouements which would seem to offer a reasonable “out” (in every sense of the word) for Naz. But The Night Of is a piece less interested in answers than in a number of troubling questions. The “who” in this whodunit may in fact never be explicitly detailed, but the “dunit” elements provide enough fascination to keep this series consistently riveting.

The Night Of Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Night Of is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer. Once again the IMDb is silent on the camera used, but some cursory internet searches suggest this was digitally shot, perhaps with Arri cameras. The look here is quite distinctive, with slightly askew framings and some cool blue color grading in some of the jail sequences that's evocative and which commendably never really materially affects detail levels. The palette is pretty tamped down throughout the series, and in fact almost looks desaturated some of the time, but fine detail levels remain excellent throughout, especially in close-ups. There are a number of rather dark sequences, as well as intentionally highly stylized moments, where detail levels aren't quite at the level of the bulk of the presentation. No overt compression anomalies were noticed.

The Night Of Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Night Of features a serviceable and at times reasonably immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. There's some decent surround activity in elements like the early basketball game or even some of the sounds of the busy New York cityscape, but large portions of this series play out in relatively more intimate dialogue scenes, where only occasional ambient environmental sounds dot the surrounds. Fidelity is fine throughout the presentation, and there are no problems with distortion, dropouts or any other damage.

The Night Of Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Somewhat surprisingly given this limited series' more or less rapturous acclaim across the board, the release comes with no supplementary content, unless one counts the recaps available under the individual episode indexes (I don't).

The Night Of Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even a lot of Ayn Rand fans don't know she wrote a play entitled The Night of January 16th. The conceit of the play is that twelve audience members are chosen at the beginning of each performance to act as jury. They then hear all the evidence and get to vote, and the cast has two script endings to follow depending on whether the verdict is guilty or not guilty. The fact that this series' very title provides a bit of ambiguity in not actually detailing what the calendar date of the crime is provides as good a clue as any that this is not going to be a cut and dried enterprise where an "armchair jury" member will be able to sort out truth from fiction and come to a reasonable conclusion. But that's actually one of this series' best attributes, for it ends up subsuming the audience in the very ambiguity that the characters within the story are experiencing. Technical merits are strong, and even without any supplementary material The Night Of comes Highly recommended.