Film Review: Late Night with the Devil 與魔鬼度深夜 (2024) - Australia / USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
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There is a particular kind of late-night television that once felt like a private conversation between the host and whoever was still awake. Late Night with the Devil understands that intimacy and then deliberately poisons it. Written and directed by Australian brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, the film is presented as recovered footage from a Halloween 1977 broadcast of Night Owls, a struggling syndicated talk show hosted by Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian). What begins as a desperate ratings stunt ends as something far more corrosive.
The premise is simple and almost irresistible: Delroy, once a rising rival to Johnny Carson, has watched his numbers collapse after personal tragedy. On Halloween night, during sweeps, he books an occult-themed special—a psychic, a professional skeptic, a parapsychologist, and the sole survivor of a satanic cult. The film is framed as the master tape of that episode, supplemented by previously unseen behind-the-scenes material. It is a found-footage movie that largely refuses the usual shaky-cam panic in favor of the controlled, multi-camera grammar of live television. The result feels both meticulously staged and unnervingly authentic.
Dastmalchian, long one of the most reliable character actors in American film, seizes the lead with the kind of controlled charisma that late-night hosts require and the underlying desperation that makes them human. Jack is funny, polished, and visibly fraying. He knows how to work an audience, how to soothe a guest, and how to push just far enough for a reaction. Watching him negotiate the increasingly unstable evening is the film’s central pleasure and its central horror. The supporting cast, particularly Laura Gordon as the parapsychologist and Ian Bliss as the abrasive skeptic, give him sharp foils without ever reducing themselves to types.
The Cairnes brothers commit fully to the 1970s aesthetic—not merely the costumes and set design, but the pacing, the lighting, the way commercial breaks and interstitial graphics structure the evening. The film understands that the most effective scares often arrive not through sudden violence but through the slow realization that the usual rules of television are no longer holding. When the extraordinary begins to happen, the cameras keep rolling because that is what cameras do. The audience, both in the studio and at home, becomes complicit simply by continuing to watch.
Late Night with the Devil is not especially interested in reinventing the possession narrative. Its interests lie elsewhere: in the cost of ambition, in the peculiar hunger of live media, and in the way a public persona can be both a prison and a bargaining chip. The film’s final stretch is more nightmarish than conventionally frightening, and some viewers will wish it sustained its tension a little longer before the descent. Yet the overall control is remarkable. At 93 minutes, it never overstays its welcome, and its best sequences linger precisely because they feel like television that has gone wrong rather than a movie trying to scare you.
In an era crowded with elevated horror and self-conscious pastiche, Late Night with the Devil succeeds by treating its concept with both affection and severity. It is stylish, smart, and genuinely unsettling—an outstanding showcase for Dastmalchian and a reminder that some of the most effective horror still begins with a simple idea: what if the thing you invited onto the stage was real? (Neo, 2026)