One great thing genre movies can do is they can give an actor or a director a chance to try something new without fear of as many box office consequences. Take Late Night With the Devil. I’ve always liked David Dastmalchian, who uses his ominous visage to great effect, maybe best so in The Dark Knight and other Nolan/Villeneuve Films. Here Dastmalchian gets to flex a little more with the Twilight Zoney Late Night With the Devil, proving we may have been underestimating the already pretty talented actor with too small of parts.
Dastmalchian is the leading man finally here, starring as Jack Delroy, host of the late night show Night Owls in the 1970s. Told as a found footage feature, the movie mostly accounts his Halloween night show in 1977. Desperate to beat Johnny Carson in the ratings, Delroy and his producer Leo Fiske (Josh Quong Tart), conjure up a spooky show during ratings sweeps. His guests? Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic, and the ratings bomb: Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her supposedly possessed teenage patient Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), all while Delroy’s skeptic guest Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss) tries to poke holes in what everyone is seeing/believing on Jack’s show that night.
Boy did David Dastmalchian pick the right project to star in. Late Night With the Devil’s premise is a banger! In a genre filled with stories of possession, spirits, and such, viewing the story through late night show found footage is not really on the list yet. Cameron and Colin Cairnes (writer/directors) do a great job immersing you into feeling like you’re watching a late night show, just from a different decade. Through the beats of a late night show most people know, as well as some offscreen footage the Cairnes’s lay the character and suspense groundwork very cleverly through TV show montages and short discussions with producers or upcoming guests. Seeing Jack on and offscreen gives insight into his feelings about his show that night, and how his various guests/supporting characters try to sway him emotionally to believer or skeptic. This all builds to Lilly’s interrogation, using the found footage camera angles to keep people feeling like they’re watching the TV show live, agasp at what is happening onscreen.
Under studio executives, David Dastmalchian would have been Christou, or the possessed person. The Cairnes’s took a risk on him, seeing if he could transform into a late night talk show host and lead of a movie. That risk pays off, and then some. Dastmalchian feels straight out of 70s casting playing Jack Delroy, abandoning any pretense of the creepy weirdos he’s played in the past. He’s mysterious still, but more because he carries a complicated mixture of desperation and melancholy as Night Owls progresses and he becomes intertwined in the supernatural and highly emotional parts of his TV program. Surrounding him are a series of unknowns game to play along with this conceit too, best of which is Ian Bliss’s skeptic, charmingly but cruelly dismantling these supposed “mediums” and “possessed” people, humiliating them on national television.
When in doubt, take a risk on a DePaul student. Dastmalchian is part of a sneaky great acting alums of the university, including Karl Malden, Judy Greer, Joe Mantegna, and John C. Reilly. I’ll admit, as a hopeful future DePaul alum I just wanted to look up the list of famous people who graduated there. I encourage you to enjoy the acting list as well…just stay away from the politician notables, filled with power obsessed Chicagoans who put themselves over the city.