Paris becomes colder after midnight. The amber glow that cinema has spent decades teaching us to expect is absent, replaced by fluorescent Metro platforms, police lights, illuminated bus shelters, fish tanks, convenience stores, and the purple wash of late-night bars. Faces pass through these spaces carrying exhaustion. Some people are going home. Others are keeping the city alive for everyone who already has.
Beatrice Gibson places herself among them as B, a filmmaker wandering through the city while scouting locations for a project she cannot quite define. During a conversation about the unfinished film, she admits that making attractive images feels easier than understanding what those images are trying to say. It is an unusually exposed admission because At Night repeatedly tests that anxiety against its own form.
The story provides only a thin path through this nocturnal Paris. B crosses paths with Didi, a single Black mother living in emergency accommodation with her children and her mother, who has dementia. Kátia cares for her own mother. Other women appear through conversations, performances, workplaces, trains, and passing encounters. Their lives rarely converge into traditional drama. They coexist for a few hours, separated by streets and circumstances, joined by the peculiar loneliness of being awake while much of the city sleeps.
Voices Without Answers
Gibson built the film collaboratively with non-professional performers drawing from their own lives, and the approach gives certain conversations an intimacy that conventional dialogue might have suffocated. Women discuss childbirth, aging, sex, gender identity, racism, poverty, motherhood, and care without sounding as if they have arrived carrying prepared arguments.
Didi gives these questions their strongest physical reality. Her family lives under the rules and surveillance of emergency housing, turning abstract discussions of class into something painfully practical. Privacy becomes conditional. Domestic life exists inside an institution. When she speaks with B about marginalization, the film also becomes conscious of the camera between them. One woman is living the experience. Another is deciding how that experience will appear onscreen.
This self-awareness matters because At Night keeps questioning who possesses an image once it has been recorded. The same looseness that creates intimacy can scatter it. B’s encounter with Didi inside a convenience store leads to the pair becoming locked inside, a coincidence that feels conspicuously engineered beside the film’s freer passages. Other conversations disappear just when their emotional pressure starts rising. A thought about sex or identity arrives, briefly opens a door, then the film wanders elsewhere.
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There is something truthful in that incompleteness. Human conversations rarely resolve themselves neatly at closing time. Yet some absences feel less like mystery and closer to interruption.
Beneath the Streets
Alice Notley’s voice seems to come from somewhere beneath the film. Her reading from The Descent of Alette, recorded shortly before her death in May 2025, accompanies images of the Paris Metro. The poem’s underground world, where a woman confronts a male tyrant who has driven everyone below ground, changes the meaning of Gibson’s trains and tunnels. Suddenly these are spaces of enclosure, movement, hierarchy, and resistance.
The association is never forced into a literal correspondence. Gibson allows Notley’s words to hover above passengers entering carriages, waiting on platforms, and disappearing through tunnels. Sophie Robinson and June Jordan add further poetic voices, creating a city where spoken language seems to linger after the speaker has vanished.
Music performs a similar function. Adam Christensen’s accordion performance in a dim bar briefly gathers the film’s dispersed melancholy into one room. Elvin Brandhi’s score absorbs the pulse of trains and the surrounding noises of Paris before opening into loose jazz textures. Mechanical rhythm becomes emotional rhythm.
Outside these performances, sanitation workers, transport employees, shopkeepers, food-stall staff, and people inside laundrettes continue moving through the night. They occupy the spaces cinema often treats as empty establishing shots. Here, emptiness has a workforce.
Beautiful Fragments
Ben Rivers shoots these streets on 16mm, and the grain makes darkness feel almost tactile. Faces emerge from cold light before slipping away again. Shopkeepers close their shutters. Someone waits inside a laundrette. Advertising panels glow with indifferent brightness. The audible clicks and whirr of the camera occasionally remind us that observation itself has machinery attached to it.
Liyo Gong’s editing embraces association rather than dramatic escalation. A face can lead to a train, a train to a poem, a poem to a conversation, then the film may simply rest on an empty street. At its strongest, this creates the sensation of drifting through several private worlds at once.
The price is accumulation without enough duration. Gibson introduces lives that could sustain entire films and sometimes leaves them after a handful of exchanges. The emotional force remains real, yet its direction becomes harder to locate. Empty shots begin to feel genuinely empty rather than contemplative.
Perhaps this uncertainty belongs to the confession B makes about her own filmmaking. She can see the city with extraordinary sensitivity. Understanding what all those images want from one another proves harder.
Still, certain fragments remain lodged in the mind: Notley’s voice moving through the underground, Didi describing a life constrained by institutional rules, Christensen folding sorrow into an accordion, strangers staring from trains beneath a Paris stripped of its familiar romance. At Night keeps losing its shape, then finding something fragile inside the darkness before it disappears again.
At Night had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on August 8, 2026. The film follows two young brothers whose close, mysterious bond becomes strained by supernatural occurrences and the growing weight of their shared past.
Full Credits
Title: At Night
Distributor: Locarno Film Festival
Release date: August 8, 2026
Running time: 87 minutes
Director: Simon Rieth
Writers: Simon Rieth, Léa Morel
Producers and Executive Producers: Claire Béjanin, Olivier Père
Cast: Simon Rieth, Nadir Ayari, Elina Löwensohn, Théo Cholbi
The Review
At Night
At Night drifts through Paris like a thought that refuses to settle. Ben Rivers’ grainy 16mm images and Elvin Brandhi’s melancholic score make the city feel cold, sleepless, and faintly haunted, while Alice Notley’s voice gives the Metro passages a strange subterranean gravity. Beatrice Gibson’s conversations about motherhood, sex, race, care, and marginalization often carry genuine intimacy, yet the film keeps abandoning people just as their lives begin to deepen. Its fragmentation can feel alive. It can also feel unfinished.
PROS
- Haunting 16mm cinematography
- Mesmerizing nocturnal soundscape
- Intimate collaborative performances
- Powerful Alice Notley passages
- Distinctive vision of Paris
CONS
- Overly loose structure
- Several ideas left underdeveloped
- Occasional staged-feeling encounters
- Emotional threads cut short
