Global cinema has a fascination with the liminal night, a space-time where societal rules are suspended and strangers can forge intense, transient bonds. From Vienna in Before Sunrise to Tokyo in Lost in Translation, the nocturnal city becomes a crucible for identity. Liam Calvert’s A Night Like This is a distinctly British entry into this subgenre, using a desolate Christmas Eve London as its backdrop.
The film introduces its protagonists as men pushed to the edge of their own narratives. Lukas, a German actor portrayed by Jack Brett Anderson, is an outsider in crisis, his personal despair reflecting a broader European displacement.
His foil is Alexander Lincoln’s Oliver, a character who initially embodies a specific kind of flailing, post-Brexit English identity: loud, entitled, and steeped in grief he cannot articulate. Their chance encounter and subsequent pact to wander until morning frames the film not merely as a romance, but as a cross-cultural negotiation of pain within a city that feels both iconic and strangely unreal.
An Unlikely Pas de Deux
The film’s weight is carried almost entirely by its two central performances, which seek to find depth where the script offers archetypes. As the introspective Lukas, Jack Brett Anderson delivers a performance rooted in stillness. He uses silence not as an absence of words, but as a direct counterpoint to Oliver’s chaotic energy.
His performance suggests a deep interior world, and his accented English constantly reminds the viewer of his outsider status. He is a foreign lens through which London’s particular brand of loneliness is observed and critiqued. This positions Lukas within a long tradition of European cinematic figures who find themselves adrift in an alienating metropolis.
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The more difficult task falls to Alexander Lincoln, who must render the aggressively obnoxious Oliver sympathetic. His early scenes are a study in repellent privilege, a flurry of drunken pronouncements and unearned confidence. Lincoln’s achievement is in the slow, careful deconstruction of this facade. He allows the mask of laddish bravado to slip in subtle moments, revealing the frightened grief of a son lost without his father.
The chemistry between the two leads is therefore not one of immediate attraction but of reluctant, magnetic pull. It is a rapport built on a verbal sparring that gradually transforms into a form of mutual interrogation, a co-dependent alliance forged in the crucible of a single, desperate night.
A Postcard of a Global City
A Night Like This presents a London that exists more as an idea than a place. Director Liam Calvert’s vision of the city feels hermetically sealed, a collection of iconic backdrops scrubbed of the complex, multicultural life that defines them. The choice to empty the streets of London on Christmas Eve serves the narrative’s focus on isolation, yet it also performs a curious cultural erasure.
The resulting metropolis is conspicuously white and eerily quiet, a tourist’s dream that feels starkly disconnected from the city’s vibrant, chaotic reality. This decision feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a narrative failure, sidestepping the rich dramatic potential of the real London.
The film’s visual language reinforces this sense of artifice. The cinematography is strikingly conventional, maintaining a polite, observational distance from its subjects. It relies heavily on functional shot/reverse-shot patterns for its lengthy conversations, a technique that captures the dialogue but fails to generate a distinct mood or visual rhythm.
The lighting often feels generic, sourced from a catalog of “indie-film noir” without being tailored to the emotional beats of the story. Unlike films that embed their characters in the gritty texture of their urban environment, the visual style here keeps the city at arm’s length. London becomes a postcard, a beautiful but lifeless backdrop for a drama that desperately needs a more grounded, authentic world to inhabit.
Echoes in an Empty Room
The screenplay by Diego Scerrati borrows the architecture of its predecessors while forgetting to furnish the rooms. It operates on a checklist of indie film clichés: the tortured artist, the privileged man with a hidden trauma, the healing power of a chance encounter. These tropes are deployed without significant subversion, leading to a narrative that feels both familiar and hollow.
The dialogue frequently bypasses naturalism in favor of stilted exposition, where characters announce their backstories and emotional states with a directness that feels inorganic. These moments of clumsy revelation, intended to be profound, instead rob the character arcs of their potential for discovery.
The script’s engagement with broader social themes is similarly superficial. It gestures toward complex issues like gentrification, mental health, and homelessness through fleeting encounters with thinly sketched side characters, including a bar owner played by David Bradley.
These topics are treated as thematic window dressing, acknowledged but never meaningfully integrated into the protagonists’ journey. They exist to signal a contemporary relevance that the film fails to earn. The story’s emotional core, a belief in the restorative power of human connection, is a noble one. Yet this connection feels forged in a vacuum, a relationship suspended in a city without a pulse and a narrative built from borrowed parts.
The film premiered at the BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival in March 2025 and is scheduled for a UK cinema release on September 26, 2025. It tells the story of two strangers, a struggling actor and a nightclub owner, who cross paths on a winter night in London and spend a revelatory evening together, getting to know each other and themselves. It has been described as a queer version of “Before Sunrise.” The film is currently not available for streaming and is only in cinemas.
Full Credits
Director: Liam Calvert
Writers: Diego Scerrati
Producers and Executive Producers: Diego Scerrati, Reece Cargan, James Heath
Cast: Alexander Lincoln, Jack Brett Anderson, David Bradley, Jimmy Ericson, Beth Rylance, Kane Surry
The Review
A Night Like This
While elevated by two compelling lead performances from Jack Brett Anderson and Alexander Lincoln, who forge a believable, fragile bond from a clichéd script, A Night Like This is ultimately an echo of better films. Its emotional potential is undercut by a derivative screenplay and a sterile, culturally hollow vision of London. The chemistry is present, but the world it inhabits feels empty, preventing a fleeting connection from becoming a truly memorable one.
PROS
- Strong, nuanced lead performances that find depth in archetypal characters.
- Authentic on-screen chemistry that builds believably from friction to a fragile bond.
- A compelling central premise focused on connection in a moment of crisis.
CONS
- A predictable script that relies heavily on familiar indie film tropes without subverting them.
- Stilted, expository dialogue that undermines naturalism.
- Superficial engagement with its own social and thematic ideas.
- An uninspired visual style and a sterile, inauthentic portrayal of its London setting.
