The Night

It delivers a clammy shiver of disquiet.

The Night defies easy explanation. There's more lurking here, in the lies we tell ourselves and each other, that you should experience for yourself.

A goosebumps-inducing affair, "The Night" is at its most effectively unsettling when the focus is to evoke fear as opposed to when it physically shows what's haunting the characters trapped in their respective secret tragedies.

Spooky and unsettling, director Kourosh Ahari's eerie suspense yarn The Night got under my skin.

It's all mood, and I don't know if it necessarily adds up.

I thought it really was effectively creepy... There's a pervasive sense that something is off.

Ahari uses every inch of his setting to immerse his audience and his characters in an atmosphere-rich environment and unloads in a final act full of chilling imagery and a steady feel of unease.

Overall, I'd say The Night is a very strong showcase for Kourosh Ahari. He has an intuition for staging and framing and a keen sense of timing that keeps the viewer off balance.

Although the story is quite derivative - and surely the "fault" of the woman will raise the eyebrows of any feminist in the audience - the truth is that the director Ahari delivers a very effective horror film.

While the premise is intriguing and the environs appropriately spooky, The Night perhaps doesn't have enough to say to flesh out an entire film without occasionally feeling repetitive.