David Dastmalchian Deserves to Be a Star
David Dastmalchian might be one of the most talented actors working today, but he’s become a familiar face in film largely through ubiquity — with brief but memorable roles as assorted weirdos in a variety of mainstream studio pictures. You might remember him as Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad, or a comically pompadoured Russian crook in the Ant-Man movies, or one of the psychos in Bird Box, or, well, one of the other psychos in The Dark Knight. Even his supporting turn in last year’s Oppenheimer, in which he played William Borden, a real-life bomber pilot turned national-security stooge who penned a damning letter against J. Robert Oppenheimer, capitalized on Dastmalchian’s anxious, unhinged energy. He’s great in these small character parts, but he can clearly do a lot more. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new horror film Late Night With the Devil, in which he walks the fine line between empathy and mystery, charming us while slowly allowing the darkness to creep in.
Written and directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes, the picture takes place over the course of one episode of a fictional late-night talk show in 1977, Night Owls With Jack Delroy. It’s a novel approach to indie-film limitations: While there are some bookends (including an introductory montage that quickly weaves together Vietnam, Watergate, the Manson family, the Son of Sam, the rise of late-night TV, and an uptick in Satanism) as well as vérité interludes during the commercial breaks, the movie unfolds with the style and rhythm of an hour-plus of late night. The look is cheap, because it’s supposed to be. The camerawork is functional, because it’s supposed to be. The colors are washed out, because they’re supposed to be.
Dastmalchian’s Delroy, a Johnny Carson wannabe whose ratings are in the toilet and who hasn’t been the same since his beautiful actress wife died of cancer a year ago, possesses a smoothness that’s likable on TV and probably insufferable in person. He has a bit of Carson’s hammy hauteur, mixed with the aw-shucks irony of David Letterman and the chummy sincerity of Dick Cavett. He enunciates clearly, delivers punch lines with a point and a smirk, and offers rehearsed asides to the audience. If previous films have used Dastmalchian’s wide-set eyes and lopsided expression to make him an oddball, Late Night With the Devil reminds us that he’s also the kind of unthreateningly handsome, relatable type who probably could get a talk show in the ’70s. He belongs.
Of course, there’s also a hint of uncertainty lurking beneath everything. In the past, Dastmalchian has talked (particularly in this lovely interview with my colleague Nate Jones) of the impostor syndrome he sometimes feels on film sets, and he appears to have used some of that anxiety to subtly inform the character of Delroy. This man is so slick and polished because, perhaps, there’s nothing else under that surface.
The uncertainty in turn feeds the menace. This is, after all, a genre picture, and the particular episode of Night Owls With Jack Delroy we’re watching is a Halloween-night sweeps special in which Delroy will have on a psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), a skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a paranormal psychologist (Laura Gordon) who claims to have with her a traumatized teenager (Ingrid Torelli) who can commune with the forces of darkness. The most interesting character among these guests is Bliss’s Carmichael the Conjurer, a dapper magician who refuses to believe any of the supposedly supernatural occurrences we’re witnessing. Since this is horror, such a character must have a requisite amount of smugness — rationalists are always the bad guys in such movies — but Bliss renders Carmichael’s officiousness kind of charming; he’s still a showman at heart.
The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going. And the picture does lose steam right as the terror and the surprise should be reaching a fever pitch, with a familiar, Exorcist-y climax (I’m not giving anything away) that doesn’t offer any new angles aside from the aforementioned late-night TV-show framing. Part of the problem might actually be rooted in how effectively the rest of the film works. Though the Cairneses do try to throw in some last-minute emotional twists, these feel thin and unremarkable — like token explanations rather than thrilling revelations. And Dastmalchian’s performance is ultimately too interesting and layered to deserve a finale that, for all its pyrotechnic Sturm und Drang, feels so shallow.