Night Has Come

Tizón, P. (Director). Castro, D. (Producer). (2024). Night Has Come. EPF Media. 95 mins. From the very first moments of the documentary Night Has Come, it’s obvious that its ambitions are largely aesthetic. The opening image of a burnt orange desert landscape as seen from above through the door of a cargo plane is followed first by a series of suspense-building close-ups of the soldiers about to jump out of it, then a contemplative long shot of one paratrooper gliding gracefully through a pristine azure sky like a jellyfish drifting through the open sea. A title card next gives way to shirtless bodies that are inescapably reminiscent of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, which director Paolo Tizón has identified as an influence. To the Peruvian state, Night’s commandos-in-training are weapons that will be deployed to the Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro or VRAEM, one of the biggest cocaine-producing regions in the world and the last stronghold of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Their training also makes them beautiful, though. Where Tizón departs from Denis is that in addition to image-making, he’s committed to preserving the humanity that those who can only conceive of his subjects as armaments or objects would obliterate. The problem is that whether as a corollary to François Truffaut’s famous observation that “every film about war ends up being pro-war” or as a result of directorial inexperience, the moments in which the soldiers make themselves vulnerable pale in comparison to those in which they learn to be invincible. Some scenes simply misfire: a series of FaceTime conversations between one trainee and his parents adds little to the way he describes their family dynamic to his bunkmates, a scene in which a soldier simulates being wounded so that his comrades can treat him runs way too long, and a brief second-person address feels a bit too much like an unnecessary “full disclosure” statement. More crucially, Night’s most striking sequences, a climactic chiaroscuro all-night endurance test and the initiation ritual that follows it, are the ones in which its subjects surrender the individuality that attracted Tizón to them and gratefully accept the return of their names as a reward. While the film smartly concludes with those soldiers frolicking in a canal, it isn’t enough to balance the scales, and this prevents a film that has a lot on its mind from making any kind of clear statement. Instructors will nonetheless find ample fodder for any number of points about masculinity and militarism, and Night has a natural home in library collections with a Latin American or film studies focus. Awards won include: Special Jury Prize; FIPRESCI Award – Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech Republic Best Direction Award – Málaga Film Festival, Spain