The Vast of Night

In 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico, teenage disc jockey Everett helps prepare for a high-school basketball game. He and his friend Fay test her new tape recorder before Everett walks her to her job as a switchboard operator and begins his shift at WOTW radio station.

While listening to Everett's broadcast, Fay hears a mysterious audio signal interrupt the program. A woman calls to report a large object hovering over her property, though the static weakens her voice. Fay alerts Everett, who asks listeners to call in with information about the signal.

A man named Billy phones the station, and Everett broadcasts the conversation live. Billy says he served in the military and was transported to a secret desert facility, where he and other personnel constructed a vast underground bunker to contain an enormous unidentified object. During a flight away from the site, he heard the same strange signal over the aircraft radio.

Billy later developed a lung condition that he attributes to his work there and learned of similar military operations involving buried cargo accompanied by the same signal. He believes the sound functions as a communication signal, sometimes transmitted from altitudes beyond the reach of human aircraft.

After the call is briefly disconnected, Billy phones again and explains that all personnel involved in the projects were either Black or Mexican, which he suspects was intended to make their testimony easier to dismiss. He says a friend secretly recorded the signal and distributed copies to former workers, including a deceased United States Air Force member from Cayuga.

Realizing the tapes were donated to the local library, Fay retrieves them. Everett and Fay locate the recording and broadcast it, but the station suddenly loses power. They rush to the switchboard office, where Fay receives numerous reports of "something in the sky". On the way, they encounter Gerald and Bertsie, who have been pursuing the same object. An elderly woman named Mabel then calls, offering further information.

Everett and Fay visit Mabel's home and find her reciting phrases in an unknown language. While Everett records the conversation, Mabel claims the phenomena are spacecraft operated by "the people in the sky", who communicate with and abduct humans. She believes the beings target isolated individuals while the town attends the basketball game and are responsible for encouraging conflict among humanity.

Mabel asks them to take her to the ship so she can reunite with her son, who she says was abducted years earlier, or at least deliver a written message. Skeptical, Everett refuses and leaves with Fay, who returns home to collect her baby sister Maddie. Gerald and Bertsie pick them up, but when Everett plays Mabel's recorded speech, the two men fall into a trance and nearly crash the car. Frightened, Everett and Fay flee with Maddie into the woods.

There, they discover charred trees and branches, convincing Everett that the visitors are real and nearby. Reaching a clearing, they witness a spacecraft rejoin a massive mothership, which sends powerful winds swirling around them.

After the basketball game ends, the townspeople emerge to find Everett, Fay, and Maddie missing. Only their footprints and tape recorder remain.

The title "The Vast of Night" is from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Starting with line 325 of Act I, scene II, Prospero addresses Caliban:

According to the director Andrew Patterson, the film came out of one of the ideas he had in the previous decade, which simply said: "1950s black and white. New Mexico, UFO landing."^[3] Patterson wrote the script with Craig W. Sanger, although he registered the script with the WGA under the pseudonym James Montague, who is also listed as the producer.^[4] Patterson also financed the film himself with earnings from his work producing commercials and shorts for the Oklahoma City Thunder and others. It was filmed in three to four weeks at a cost of $700,000.^[4]

The film was shot mostly in Whitney, Texas, during the fall of 2016, starting in September.^[5][6] The town was selected after looking through many towns to find one with the right gymnasium. In order to get the period details correct, the production team removed the three-point line of the basketball court in the gym at a cost of $20,000, and they found functional switchboards which were used at that time.^[7] The cinematographer for the film was M.I. Littin-Menz. Patterson spent a year editing the film.^[4]

The film premiered at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival and went on to screen at several other film festivals. Amazon Studios acquired the movie in September 2019,^[8] and the trailer was released on February 6, 2020.^[9] The film was released in drive-in cinemas nationally on May 15, 2020, and on Amazon Prime on May 29.^[4]