Night Film in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

May 13, 2015 Jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

I think I switched my rating between three stars and four stars half a dozen times before settling on three - Night Film does a lot of things right, but it still didn't quite work for me.

At the center of the book is a highly successful cult filmmaker, Stanislas Cordova, whose output was from the beginning dark and horrifying, and later became so unsettling that his films were no longer commercially available and had to be watched at covert screenings in tunnels and under bridges. He has a follow I think I switched my rating between three stars and four stars half a dozen times before settling on three - Night Film does a lot of things right, but it still didn't quite work for me.

At the center of the book is a highly successful cult filmmaker, Stanislas Cordova, whose output was from the beginning dark and horrifying, and later became so unsettling that his films were no longer commercially available and had to be watched at covert screenings in tunnels and under bridges. He has a following of obsessed fans who believe his movies expose you to the darkest corners of experience so that you can learn to live without fear. He is a total recluse and hasn't been seen or released a new movie in years.

The book opens with the apparent suicide of his 24-year-old daughter Ashley, a former piano prodigy. Her death causes journalist Scott McGrath to reopen old files on Cordova - files that resulted in him becoming totally disgraced as a journalist after publicly accusing Cordova of engaging in sinister activities in real life, not just on the screen. Scott, along with two twenty-something sidekicks he meets in the course of his investigations, becomes convinced that the whole Cordova family is involved in something truly dark, maybe even paranormal.

The book is frequently interspersed with text-heavy images of web pages, magazine articles, and items from Scott's case files, so that you alternate between hearing Scott's perspective and looking at the media he's looking at. There is also an app, Night Film Decoder, that allows you to access additional content like audio, video, movie posters, and journal entries at specific points in the book. A lot of the additional content in the app is throwaway, but a few of them do really serve to heighten the creepy feeling of learning more and more about Cordova's world.

The narrative is compelling, and I found myself staying up late several nights in a row to read just a few more chapters - but the writing is not actually very good, the characters are two-dimensional, and I just couldn't suspend my disbelief quite enough to accept some of the book's premises (especially the way Pessl seemed to want Cordova to be both a cult filmmaker whose films are so horrific that most people can't bear to watch them and a highly successful, household-name director who earned a Best Director Academy Award).

I had heard from a lot of other people that the ending of the book was a big disappointment, and when Pessl kept mentioning how Cordova's films consistently end in a way that leaves the entire story open to multiple interpretations, I was pretty sure this meant that Night Film was going to end without any resolution - and indeed, the book falls flat when it stops abruptly, but in a way that felt more like giving up than like leaving the reader with anything to wrestle with. It wasn't a cliffhanger kind of situation where I felt angry at the author for leaving me to decide what happened next; it felt more like the author wasn't sure where else to go with the story and decided to cut it off in hopes of seeming "mysterious."

Overall I feel like Night Film does some really interesting things, but it's a lot of surface without the depth it promises. It's not nearly as creepy or as smart as it sets out to be, though I liked the premise enough that I was able to forgive some of that just because I wanted to see where the story would go next. It's an interesting book, but not one I'd specifically recommend to anyone because I think the execution could have been so much better than it was. ...more

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Sep 25, 2013 Sarah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

An excellent mystery/thriller. For the most part I'm not the biggest fan of this genre, as I find the "gripping whodunit" style too exhausting and redundant. But this one was smartly written, and in some cases absolutely horrifying. It also nearly all takes place in NYC, which is always a selling point for me.

In what is probably an inevitable shift for all books everywhere, this book comes with an app that provides more interactive features. I strongly dislike this. It takes you out of the story ...more

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Aug 15, 2013 Ally rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This was one of the best books I've read in recent memory. It reminds me of one of my all-time favorites: The Historian. Read it today (both of them if you haven't!). ...more

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Sep 25, 2014 Susanne Clower rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

This was really good, and scary. I was hooked right away. This was the kind of book that made me wish I had neither job nor friends nor spouse, so that I could shut the world away and just read.

And I was not a huge fan of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

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Feb 07, 2015 Kerry rated it liked it

Odd, dark and just a bit twisted. It reminded me of be caught in a freaky haunted house. Exciting, a bit disorienting, creepy, but you want to keep going.

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Sep 25, 2013 Rachel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Holy shit! This is a really good ride. And I'm really glad I read it in October because it gets CREEPY in parts. Not Stephen King creepy, but creepy in a good mystery way. Loved all the pop culture references and loved the characters. ...more

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