Late Night with the Devil (2023)
The ratings are terrible. The booking is worse.
Directed by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes · 93 minutes
Source-based draft ready for editorial review. Critical readings, verdict and advisories are proposed.
Version note: The title uses the 2023 premiere year. General theatrical release followed in 2024; runtime is rounded from the classified 92m48s release.
Television has a useful defence against embarrassment: cut to a commercial. Late Night with the Devil imagines a programme whose worst mistake is still waiting when the commercial ends.
The Cairnes brothers build their horror around a Halloween talk-show broadcast in 1977. The format gives each new provocation a plausible commercial motive. The people involved do not need to want a catastrophe. They need to want an audience badly enough to ignore the reason a demonstration should stop.
Before you watch
Contains strong supernatural horror, graphic injury imagery and violence involving a young guest. Suicide and cult self-immolation are discussed. There are flashing images. The BBFC assessment supports these advisories without requiring the review to reveal the climax.
Specific content details (contains spoilers)
- Jack fatally stabs Lilly while perceiving a different victim during the final supernatural ordeal.
The setup
Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is the host of Night Owls, a struggling late-night programme. His Halloween special brings occult material into the studio in pursuit of attention. What starts as a controlled piece of television develops a life the host cannot reliably direct.
The film is presented through the conceit of a recovered broadcast and associated material. That conceit matters to the criticism: a studio camera, a backstage view and an image that cannot plausibly belong to either are different kinds of evidence.
Performance under pressure
The host is the right centre for the story because his job is to maintain a tone. He must seem amused, concerned or sceptical at the moment the programme requires it. Dastmalchian's role therefore sits between performance as a character trait and performance as paid labour. Jack’s professional composure becomes a form of denial: continuing the broadcast allows him to keep treating an emerging disaster as material he can introduce and conclude.
The talk-show setting supplies more than period decoration. Guests have reasons to challenge one another, staff have reasons to keep moving, and the presence of an audience makes backing down a public event. Every warning can be converted into a segment. The horror gains a social mechanism before it needs a supernatural one.
The principal formal question is whether the film keeps faith with its own recovered-footage device. It is reasonable for a supernatural story to destabilise what is being seen. It still needs to make a useful distinction between that destabilisation and convenient access to whatever image the screenplay wants. In the final stretch, the film leaves the recording’s boundaries to enter Jack’s subjective experience. The result is more explicit about guilt and less persuasive as recovered television.
Corny DNA
The cheap grandeur of a television occult special invites camp, but the programme's tackiness should not be confused with an inability to stage horror. The premise also allows criticism of exploitation: a vulnerable guest can become a ratings opportunity while everyone involved keeps calling the event entertainment.
Verdict
Worth watching — proposed. A promising choice for viewers drawn to performance-driven horror and the machinery of television spectacle. The studio tension is stronger than the eventual explanation, but the host’s need to keep performing gives the film a compelling centre.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the plot details and ending
A demonstration that knows the presenter
Carmichael's worm demonstration is exposed as shared suggestion when the recording is reviewed. The possession images do not disappear under the same test. The distinction gives the film a useful intermediate rule: a crowd's experience can be unreliable without making every recorded event equally dismissible.
The final movement leaves that security behind. Jack encounters a nightmare of the show's history and an apparent bargain connecting his success with his wife's death. Believing he is ending Madeleine's suffering, he stabs Lilly; the image returns to the studio and the child he has actually killed. The plot account corroborates the final action. The vision's account of the bargain remains mediated by the supernatural ordeal rather than independently demonstrated documentary evidence.
Ending the transmission
The move into Jack's experience breaks the clean recovered-broadcast conceit. It clarifies his guilt at the cost of the studio's more economical uncertainty. That is a defensible trade, but it is also the film's main formal weakness: the last explanation can feel larger and less distinctive than the television performance that preceded it.
The brutal final fact is narrower. A vulnerable child has become the price of a man's attempt to preserve his story about himself. His professional ability to keep a programme going offers no useful way to undo what the programme has enabled.