A review by fluoresensitive
Night Film by Marisha Pessl

challenging dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0


Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect. 

These are the three words that describe the terrifying masterworks of the fictional horror film maker Stanislas Cordova. The story hinges on his movies, his hungry cult of fans and critics, the people repulsed and changed by him. We see his strange impact through the eyes of disgraced, semi-retired investigative journalist, Scott McGrath, a somewhat embittered man who digs into Cordova and his daughter, Ashley Cordova. There are heists. There are fantastic, fabulous sentences on the necessity of horror, there are gorgeous passages that reminded me why I love to write horror.

I did not like Night Film. This is majorly disappointing to me, because everything in me wanted to like it. The plot was fascinating, the prose was interesting. I could’ve forgiven the excessive italics and all-white cast in many other circumstances, but this book was appalling racist and transmisogynistic. There’s no greater shock than thinking you can enjoy a book as a trans person of color only to see your trans sisters be mocked, or to flip through a story only to discover that the author (white, of course) thinks all Asian people are weird and savage. 

The moments of the book I liked (meeting Marlow Hughes, Cordova’s ex-wife; unwinding the “true” story behind Cordova through different people’s perspectives of him) were tainted for me. All in all, an upsetting read. Night Film could’ve been a tour de force with a bit more sensitivity reading, an editor to cut out half the italics, and maybe a little better pacing. This story definitely could’ve lost a hundred or so pages, and kept its substance. Maybe the scenes where Pessl relentlessly bags on trans women can be chopped?

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