The Sunlit Night movie review (2020)

I imagine Wnendt and his editor Andreas Wodraschke may have adopted a similar attitude when their initial cut of the film—unseen by me—debuted to poor reviews at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, about 24 minutes have been removed from the picture’s running time, which makes the bookended sequences of critical analysis designed to affirm Frances’ supposed evolution hit all too close to home. “Did I get where I needed to go?” Frances asks herself with bated breath before her fearsome judges recognize that she is indeed “getting somewhere.” Could the same be said for the film itself? It’s a bit of a mess, to be sure, and though I fear some necessary contextual scenes may have been stripped away in the reedit, what remains on the screen is gorgeously photographed, well-acted and a little more thoughtful than one might expect.

On a certain basic level, “The Sunlit Night” offers the sort of pleasant escapism typified by Audrey Wells’ undervalued “Under the Tuscan Sun,” where its female protagonist travels to an exotic locale after a jolting turn of events to rediscover herself while finding unexpected romance. What makes Wnendt’s film a somewhat tougher sell is the fact that its setting is less of a tourist destination than a purgatorial valley warranting the title, “Under the Unending Norwegian Sun.” For reasons the movie never gets around to specifying, Frances breaks up with her boyfriend—whom we only glimpse in the opening credit sequence—before moving back in with her parents, Levi (David Paymer) and Mirela (Jessica Hecht), both artists confined in jobs that stunt their creativity. Levi has a rather insufferable habit of making everything about himself, disrupting the news of his daughter Gaby’s engagement with the bombshell that he and his wife are splitting up. Perhaps there’s no secret as to why Frances is aggressively upbeat, since her new gig in ever-sunlit Norway is clearly preferable to sharing a cramped studio with Levi, who carelessly knocks over her easel while inflating an absurdly large blow-up mattress.

Faced with no desirable prospects, Frances decides to aid a fellow critically reviled artist, Nils (Fridtjov Såheim), in completing an installation project in the Lofoten islands, a job she likens to “arctic detention at the edge of the world.” The dynamic she forges with Nils is not all that far removed from the one between Heidi, the tirelessly upbeat heroine of Johanna Spyri’s timeless novel, and her distant, antisocial grandfather. Nils has no inkling of how to engage with Frances’ talkative demeanor, apart from drowning out her voice with his car radio, though he does order her to strike the word “awesome” from her vocabulary, since the term isn’t befitting of their tedious endeavor. The script by Rebecca Dinerstein, which she adapted from her own novel, contains some wonderful dialogue passages that artfully visualize how the characters perceive one another, such as when Nils eventually realizes that he and Frances complement each other like the colors orange and blue (the latter of which is seen when shifting one’s gaze from an orange hue to a white wall).