The Night Clerk (2020) - A Mystery as Cold and Lifeless as the Murder it Portrays

The Night Clerk is a film that desires to be a multitude of things, many of which contrast with one another, and it ultimately fails to wholeheartedly succeed at any one of its endeavors. I would say its wildly unfocused narrative and constant genre shifting was disorienting as a viewer, but it's such a tonally listless and emotionally detached movie that I didn't find myself invested enough to find its lack of concentration jarring. Just boring, really.

It's rather unfortunate because there are a pair of capable leads here in Tye Sheridan and Ana de Armas, both of whom turn in frustratingly good performances wasted entirely on a bland and uninspired script.

Sheridan, in particular, is very impressive as our titular hotel clerk, Bart, a 23-year old with Asperger's who becomes the center of a murder investigation. His performance is genuinely solid, and it's ultimately his dedicated work that kept me even moderately interested in this movie. Anytime an actor portrays a character on the autism spectrum, it threatens to be annoyingly exaggerated and exploitative, but Sheridan never crosses that line.

De Armas does fine work opposite him. She conjures an air of mystery that was wholly necessary for her character to be effective. But again, her engaging performance is in support of a film that has no intention of fruitfully utilizing it.

The Night Clerk's biggest problem lies in its inability to make a decision regarding what type of film it is. Initially, it tries to be a sleek techno-thriller about a grisly murder captured unscrupulously on Bart's hidden cameras, which he placed in the rooms of the hotel at which he works in order to study human behavior and attempt to emulate it. The film subsequently transforms into a half-baked police procedural with John Leguizamo's police detective suspicious of Bart's involvement in the killing. After it does this dance for a while, it seems to lose all interest in the crime-oriented elements of its story and focuses on the offbeat, thoroughly underwritten romance between Bart and de Armas' Andrea, a mysterious woman who checks into the hotel shortly after the murder. In the end, it tries to tie all these disparate strands together into a cohesive finale, but its attempts to conclude the story in a lucid, satisfying manner fall profoundly short.

It's a film that falls victim to its own unnecessarily lofty ambitions. Aspiring writers should use this movie's issues to refine the way they approach their own scripts: simple is often better. It may be tempting to throw as many different genres and plot twists into your story as possible in an attempt to be noticeable or unique, but maintaining a strong narrative focus and zeroing in on one or two central ideas is almost always a more judicious strategy.

While scrolling through Netflix, you may stumble upon this film, see its talented cast, be intrigued by its premise, and want to watch it. As it stands, however, The Night Clerk is a mystery best left unsolved.

D+

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