Late Night with the Devil

Late Night with the Devil starts from a simple and very effective idea: make us feel as if we are watching a lost television broadcast from the 1970s, then slowly let that familiar format rot from the inside. What begins as entertainment, performance and a desperate search for ratings gradually becomes more disturbing until the show itself stops feeling like protection from horror and becomes the vehicle that carries it.

What works best for me is the recreation of the late-night show. Sets, lighting, transitions, audience, interviews, commercial breaks, cameras and that mixture of professional charm and nervous television energy are captured extremely well. It does not feel like a movie dressed up as an old TV program, but like an old TV program that is losing control of something it never understood. That sense of watching footage that should not exist is central to the film's appeal.

David Dastmalchian is excellent because he understands Jack Delroy completely. He does not play him as a sinister host, but as someone trained to please, improvise and keep the show alive at any cost. That professionalism becomes increasingly uncomfortable as the program crosses boundaries it should never have crossed. Ambition, the need to recover an audience and the inability to stop while stopping is still possible make him far more interesting than a simple host of disaster.

The film handles one central idea extremely well: television demands that the show go on. As long as everything can still be presented as a trick, fraud, suggestion or performance, everyone seems willing to continue. The real problem begins when what is happening can no longer be contained within the logic of entertainment. At that point the format becomes perverse: the cameras keep recording even after the show has stopped being a show.

I also like the way the satanic material is used. It is not empty decoration, but a presence that gradually contaminates the entire broadcast. What initially feels like a themed night begins to suggest that a door has been opened and nobody knows how to close it. The more television tries to transform the inexplicable into content, the more threatening it becomes.

The faux-documentary and recovered-footage aesthetic helps enormously, even if the film is not always completely rigorous about its own rules. There are moments when it steps outside the strict logic of the supposed broadcast and adopts more openly cinematic devices. I can understand why that might bother some viewers, but it never ruined the experience for me because the overall tone is strong enough.

The film is at its best when the spectacle begins to lose control. It understands escalation and does not reveal every card too early. First comes doubt, then discomfort, and finally the feeling of being trapped inside a nightmare. That progression gives the final stretch far more impact than it would have had if the movie had started with chaos.

What I found especially interesting is how the horror eventually becomes intimate. Just when it seems that everything might resolve itself through noise, effects and violence, the film moves inside its protagonist's head and turns memory, guilt and loss into part of the terror. At that point it stops being merely a story about a cursed broadcast and becomes something more personal: the price of turning absolutely everything, even pain, into fuel for staying in front of a camera.

It did not terrify me, but it did unsettle me. It works more through unease, anticipation and the feeling of watching something deteriorate live than through conventional scares. There is also a clear playful streak: the film knows it is making horror and enjoys mixing television spectacle, occult material and disaster.

There are a few excesses, and the ending embraces a nightmare logic that may feel too abrupt for viewers who want the rules of the fake live broadcast to remain intact. For me, however, it was consistent with the escalation that came before. By that point it matters less what belongs to the broadcast and what belongs to Jack's fractured perception; what matters is that he has completely lost control of the story.

Late Night with the Devil worked very well for me. It has personality, an excellent 1970s recreation, a terrific lead performance and a smart central idea: television as a machine capable of turning anything into entertainment until it discovers that some things cannot be controlled. It is fun, unsettling and deeply macabre. And when it stops pretending that everything is still entertainment and becomes a continuous nightmare, it finds its strongest moments.