Midnighters is a 2018 thriller about a young couple whose strained marriage faces the ultimate test after they cover up a terrible crime and find themselves entangled in a Hitchcockian web of deceit and madness.
It’s not quite a stretch to think of the Coen Brothers‘ 1996 crime caper Fargo when giving Julius Ramsay‘s latest Midnighters a glance, each a story of escalation through one crazy thing after another. While not much connects them after that, there is a mystery at the heart of this tale, and for much of it, is pretty effective and genuinely engaging, and while it certainly has its flaws is nonetheless clever enough to do what it intends.
On New Year’s night, as the ball is dropping and locals at a small town club embrace the countdown, Lindsey (Alex Essoe) is standing alone while her husband Jeff (Dylan McTee) is outside grabbing a smoke. They aren’t necessarily an unhappy couple but this is where they’re at. Not drunk but with both having had a few to drink, they decide to head home, driving down a country road where some sparks between them suggest a rekindling, though just as Jeff takes his eyes of the road, he slams into a man walking along the shoulder. Not sure if he’s dead, and now panicked, unable to get cell reception, they stuff the body in the car and take it home, thinking they will sober up and then face the music. Naturally, that’s a plan rife with problems and soon enough, everything starts to fall apart.
Written by Alston Ramsay, Julius’ brother, the duo manage to weave a smart story out of tenuous threads, making for a mostly very satisfying mystery. And mystery is what this is because there is much more at play. First, Lindsey and Jeff aren’t living alone. With them is Lindsey’s curiously ambiguous sister Hannah (Perla Haney-Jardine), who comes upon the body, only it ain’t dead and things then take another traumatic turn as she makes her own assumptions about the man. Worse, they learn that maybe this guy wasn’t randomly walking on that road. He was heading their way. But for who? And why?
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While things begin to stack up, it starts to push on the gaps between these characters, creating chasms that soon seem impossible to cross. We soon realize that there is deeper bitterness here than it first seemed and accusations start to fray the already shredding ends. In this mix enters a fourth player, a mysterious detective named Smith (Ward Horton) who has his own agenda and soon we’re neck deep in a thick as molasses chiller where we’re not sure what is going on. The Ramsay’s do best in keeping things tense, even as things begin to grow a little out of hand, though by the time things get to this point, we’re pretty well ensnared in trying to figure it all out and are mostly willing to just go for the ride.
This is much more a character study than a straight up thriller with plenty of slower moments that keep the pace sort of tempered throughout with pitches of jarring intensity. It’s never really all that authentic of course, playing out more like a dark morality tale with a heavy dose of the creeps, even if some of that doesn’t have the payoff it seems to set us up for. However, with good direction, convincing characters, and enough hooks to keep this clicking, this is a surprising little gem that should definitely satisfy genre fans thirsty for a juicy mystery.