In Night Always Comes, Vanessa Kirby delivers a tense overnight odyssey but never quite lands its emotional punch
Night Always Comes wants to be both—a thriller and a searing working-class drama—but it struggles to fully immerse us in the social reality it wants to critique
Director: Benjamin Caron
Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zack Gottsagen, Stephan James, Randall Park and Julia Fox
Rating: ★★.5
In recent years, pop culture has gorged itself on tales of the wealthy — glossy mansions, picture-perfect kitchens and characters so Instagram-ready they barely feel real. What started as post-pandemic escapism, in many ways, has become stale. That’s where Night Always Comes enters — a Netflix adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s 2021 novel, swapping satire for grit, and shifting the spotlight to someone on the very edge of financial collapse. Helmed by British director Benjamin Caron and fronted by Vanessa Kirby, the film is tense, intermittently gripping, but doesn’t always deliver the emotional depth it promises.
Lynette (Vanessa Kirby) shares a crumbling childhood home with her developmentally disabled brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen) and their unreliable mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh). With the landlord ready to sell, Lynette sees a rare shot at stability — buying the house before it’s lost forever. The plan hinges on Doreen covering part of the downpayment, but when the moment arrives, Doreen not only skips the meeting but turns up hours later with a brand-new car bought using the money. Faced with an overnight deadline to raise $25,000, Lynette launches into a dusk-to-dawn scramble across the city: confronting old friends who owe her money, slipping back into sex work with a wealthy client (Randall Park), revisiting dangerous figures from her past (Michael Kelly), partnering with an ex-con co-worker (Stephan James) for a risky break-in, and tangling with a sleazy party host (Eli Roth). As each encounter grows riskier, Lynette’s desperation blurs into recklessness, pushing her to the brink.
The good
Vanessa Kirby’s performance is the heartbeat of the film — wiry, brittle, and humming with exhaustion. She captures the restless energy of someone living on borrowed time, making Lynette’s urgency palpable. Caron’s direction is taut in the early sequences, blending thriller beats with a social-realist edge. The ticking clock device — time stamps marking the progression of her ordeal — adds a layer of tension, while Damian Garcia’s cinematography drenches Portland in a mix of cold realism and neon-lit unease.
The supporting cast adds texture: Zack Gottsagen brings warmth as Kenny, a grounding counterpoint to the chaos; Stephan James is magnetic as the one ally willing to get his hands dirty; Julia Fox leaves an impression in a short but biting role. The film also resists sanitising Lynette — she’s impulsive, prickly, and sometimes self-sabotaging, which makes her more believable than the overly noble portraits of working-class women cinema often delivers.
The bad
For all its urgency, Night Always Comes struggles to fully immerse us in the social reality it wants to critique. While the plot is high on atmosphere, the adaptation skims over the systemic forces — gentrification, economic precarity — that underpin Lynette’s plight, leaving the stakes feeling smaller than they are.
Certain plot turns stretch credibility, particularly Lynette’s escalating willingness to court disaster despite having so much to lose. The episodic structure — moving from one shady encounter to the next — sometimes makes the film feel like a checklist of increasingly extreme situations rather than an organic escalation.
Casting choices occasionally undermine believability. Vanessa, though compelling, doesn’t fully embody the weathered, hard-lived quality the role demands, while Jennifer Jason Leigh feels misaligned with the script’s vision of a beaten-down, embittered mother. And when the final confrontation between mother and daughter arrives, it hits with force in performance but lacks the psychological buildup to feel truly earned. The fadeout, a sunrise drive, gestures at catharsis without offering much resolution.
The verdict
Night Always Comes wants to be both a pressure-cooker thriller and a searing working-class drama. In its best moments, it’s tense, well-acted, and grounded in an underrepresented perspective. But its grip loosens in the later stretches, where the emotional weight doesn’t match the intensity of the events. Noble in its intentions and occasionally gripping, it’s a film that simmers rather than boils — atmospheric, yes, but never quite as devastating as it could be.
