Night Film

DNF at 27%. What the hell is this? What went so absolutely wrong with this book? Multiple things, actually.

Have any of you seen Snow White and The Huntsman, the movie? It was pretty awful. Every damn character keeps talking about Snow White being the best thing since forever, her personality, her beauty, her aura just so flawless she inspires endless love and devotion in everyone. Even non-human characters. Yet you look at Kristen Stewart, playing Snow White, and she is just standing there, slightly confused, with her mouth a bit open, looking like a totally mundane human who doesn't even understand what is going on.
This book is that. Exact same feeling. Let me elaborate, because this review is unhinged at this point and I can't let you go home feeling that way.

Night Film is about mystery around an elusive movie director called Stanislas Cordova. His movies are visceral and disturbing, a force of nature. They are independently made, because he was just too weird for conventional cinema. His fans have secret communities with illegal screenings underground (sometimes literally). He lives on this secluded compound, where he works and he never engages with the public.
Then his 24-year-old daughter commits suicide.
A journalist, who used to be obsessed with finding out Cordova's secrets and got his career ruined for it, starts to try and unravel the mystery of what happened to Ashley Cordova.

Sounds super spooktastic. Sounds like it would be magnetic, you would get obsessed with Cordova and his family, like the people in universe got obsessed with his movies.
Yeah, no, think again. I know I am supposed to be confused and excited. To see more, to learn more, to get more of the clues. Yet this is incredibly boring and flavourless. The writing holds absolutely sub zero pressure on you. Sure, not all books like this need to be scary. But to be not only not scary, but THIS BORING? That's a crime.
The characters, McGrath, his UWU quirky sidekick Nora and hot, strung out, so indie Sidekick No. 2 Hopper go from place to place. They sneak into a mental hospital! Yet it all reads like an absolute slog. You never feel the danger. It never feels risky. Never feels like something could happen to them.
The prose is so colourless. Sure, we know what kind of stockings Nora wears, but none of the words build any form of momentum. We get the name of the store from which she got her sopping bags REPEATEDLY, but we are not getting any closer to even just opening up the central mystery.

I think one big issue with it is the fact it's never confidently anything. It's not existential enough, never scary enough, never gorey, spooky, atmospheric. It's just in this state of... nothing really. Characters all talk in this samey voice of no real emotion. They say what they saw and what they felt, but it's hollow. I am being told things without being convinced or infected by their ideas and any passion behind them.
Then again, the characters did really all sound the same, main and side ones alike. We get told about their quirks through their looks and surroundings, yet they all come off sounding like the author. I'm sure she is lovely and all, but she sure as hell doesn't know how to give her characters different vocabulary or ways of expressing themselves, from the 19-year-old manic pixie to the retired apple farmer. Indistinct, like the rest of this book.

The book contains a lot of newspaper clippings and such. Could be fun, wasn't.

So all in all, I just don't want to get myself into a reading slump with something that so fundamentally fails one of the big things about its genre.