Review: Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Colin and Cameron Carines’ Late Night with the Devil has a brilliant conceit: most of the movie is presented as a TV broadcast of a fictional 1970s late-night show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a competitor of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Most shots are presented as analog multi-cam broadcast shots: full frame with slightly muted colours. There are cuts to the studio audience and reaction shots from the band and sidekick. There are even intertitle cards and commercial breaks. This approach makes Late Night with the Devil a novel approach on the found-footage subgenre, which has mostly fallen out of favour in recent years. The film’s limitations are straightforward: the more it breaks from its conceit, the less interesting it gets. Nevertheless, the total effect of the stylistic approach, digressions and all, makes for a compelling 93 minutes.

The film stars David Dastmalchian, a popular supporting actor with a creepy affect, known from Dune, Oppenheimer, and The Suicide Squad. Here, Dastmalchian gets to play the host, Jack Delroy, gladhanding guests on his program, playing to the audience, generally being more charming and charismatic than he’s allowed in most roles. But Dastmalchian’s creepy undercurrent doesn’t quite disappear here. In fact, it’s essential to Jack as a character, as he’s hiding something sinister beneath his optimistic television veneer.

In Late Night with the Devil, Jack Delroy’s program is in freefall, so he stages a gimmicky Halloween broadcast in 1977 in the hopes of reviving his ratings. He invites on parapsychologist, June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), and her patient, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who grew up in a Satanic church and apparently has a demon living inside her. Jack wants June to help Lilly channel the demon on his show so Night Owls can be the first TV program to air a demonic possession on live television. Of course, things go horribly wrong, but the film doesn’t rush to the moment of demonic carnage the way many horror movies would. It takes its sweet time, with a laconic tone that is mostly absent in horror movies (save the work of Ti West).

Like a proper late night show, there are acts to Late Night with the Devil, with different guests and gags. Jack gives an opening monologue riffing on the news. He jokes around with his comical sidekick, Gus (Rhys Auteri), who plays a theremin and sports cheap costumes to play into the Halloween setting. The other guests don’t have quite the same intrigue as Lilly, but they’re not throwaway parts of the program or the film’s overall plot. There’s the hokey psychic, Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), and the former magician turned paranormal debunker, Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss). Each character has their part to play in the overall horror about to unfold.

One of the film’s great strengths is that despite us knowing that the broadcast will inevitably turn out poorly, the film keeps us guessing about each twist and turn in the plot. Which characters are phony? What’s Jack’s secret? Is Lilly real or a fake? The film doesn’t show its hand in how everything unfolds. In fact, you could almost argue it’s a bit too slow and deliberate in keeping to the pacing of a typical late night broadcast. The broadcast format does limit the ability to regulate the pace since it’s all programmatic. The film also isn’t scary in the way many other horror films are; there are few jump scares and little dread-inducing music. The stylistic approach makes these elements mostly impossible.

It still works well, aside from the occasional black-and-white “behind-the-scenes” shots we get during commercial breaks. These moments explain too much or belabour emotional conflicts that are obvious, but more subtly suggested, during the broadcast scenes. If the film had restricted itself to nothing but the broadcast, Late Night with the Devil would likely become a minor classic in found-footage horror. As it stands, it’s more a novelty than anything else, but one that is genuinely entertaining and more stylistically interesting than most movies coming out in 2024.

7 out of 10

Late Night with the Devil (2023, Australia/UAE/USA)

Written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes; starring David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri, Georgina Haig, Josh Quong Tart.

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