Actor David Dastmalchian is an odd duck. He has a long face weighed down by the pressures his characters carry and the secrets & desires they harbour. Even when his role selection leans toward weirdos & villains (Polka-Dot Man in James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad”; Piter in “Dune” (2021); Murdoch on TV’s “MacGyver” revival), Dastmalchian’s work sidesteps mockery for sympathy.

David’s casting as a talk show host in “Late Night with the Devil” is inspired, in one of the most “normal” portraitures that I’ve seen out his filmography. However, I think directors the Cairnes brothers do their lead a disservice by making David’s Jack Delroy a Carson competitor, placing the character in the same pantheon as contemporaries Leno & Letterman. Dastmalchian’s subdued Delroy would have played better as a Charlie Rose/ Dick Cavett type, even if that meant no additional texture in the form of a studio audience. I won’t say David’s Delroy is uncharismatic, but maybe a little too first-season Springer for the subject matter (the character deliberately transitioned his show to tabloid trash for ratings, so more cockiness would have played to that).

As someone who enjoys “lo-fi” vaporwave, “Late Night” was an aesthetic feast, with visuals mimicking live television from the 1970s, the on-stage orchestra with its oboes & saxophones, and crusty title-cards. In-between these moments of found-footage were black & white “behind-the-scenes” takes that are framed perhaps too much like a movie and took away from the purity of the “live” footage. Other details – such as the stoic Cavendish ad-reps sitting in the front row, or the boom-mic dipping into shots – counterbalanced the pretence of authenticity.

Does the film succeed as horror? I would say it succeeds at constantly-mounting dread: Ingrid Torelli as Delroy’s young, demon-possessed guest is incredibly cute & effectively spooky, and there’s a brilliant (and earned) sequence involving worms that plays with audience perspective. As far as the ending, it could have gone a number of different ways but I was not disappointed with what the filmmakers chose narratively: only underwhelmed by the out-of-place CGI work and abrupt aspect-ratio change (although it was a very cool creature design in the climax).

Overall, Late Night is effective in healthy fits-and-bursts, it’s a transient 90-minutes-long, and may play better via home streaming than in theatres.

2.5 out of 5