8.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
After a night of partying with a female stranger, a man wakes up to find her stabbed to death and is charged with her murder.
Starring: Riz Ahmed, John Turturro, Bill Camp, Payman Maadi, Poorna JagannathanDrama | 100% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Spanish: DTS 2.0
English SDH, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Blu-ray Disc
Three-disc set (3 BDs)
Digital copy
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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