One of the joys of film festivals is stumbling across something utterly new, sometimes that goes as far as a national cinema you know little about. Girl in the Night is, to the best of my knowledge, my first contemporary Slovenian film, and if it’s representative of the kinds of stories being told there, then it’s a national cinema we should be paying more attention to. Whether its the first from any era, I couldn’t say as Second Run exposes you to a lot from this part of world.

Written and directed by Luka Marčetič, Girl in the Night follows Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a petty thief whose life could generously be described as uneventful. He lives in a state of near-total mundanity, Birdwatching is his big exciting hobby, his dead-end job offers little excitement beyond the occasional opportunity to steal when his colleague falls asleep. Even then, when an opportunity for thieving presents itself, he repeatedly counts down from five before building up the courage to actually take anything. His mundanity goes deeper than his role in life, and down into his core from his monotone and repetitive speech patterns, even his flatmates are equally unremarkable – every corner of his existence is drained of urgency.

That changes when he meets Iza (Lara Wolf), a young woman whose path he crosses during one of his nightshifts. Being a hesitant opportunist, Rok attempts to steal her bicycle, he fails his first attempt before succeeding later on. The theft itself perfectly captures the film’s peculiar sense of humour, Rok disguises himself with a cloth over his head, a makeshift cape, and a face smeared with jet-black boot polish – like a home-made supervillain. It is a profoundly stupid sight, yet the film treats the operation with complete seriousness, that contrast between the ridiculous and sincere is one of the many running ideas at the core of Girl in the Night. Iza is every bit as strange. By day she appears relatively normal, but by night she becomes a vigilante, dedicating herself to the solving of extraordinarily petty crimes. Petty they may be, yet her manner doesn’t exactly follow suit, this is best expressed by how quick to violence she is – a streak that goes as far as threatening to murder whoever took her bike. See, to Iza, that’s like someone stealing the batmobile. She also regularly tells friends that she can fly, only she can’t do it in front of people as she finds it embarrassing. Whether she can actually fly is left up to suggestion; like much of Girl in the Night, this runs happily on that ambiguity somewhere between reality and imagination.

FOR MORE ON THE GIRL IN THE NIGHT AND FANTASTIC FEST CLICK THE POSTER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE REVIEW

Visually, it creates a fascinating world. The music carries a sparse, gothic quality despite being rooted in electronic sounds, simultaneously evoking a sense of wonder and abject loneliness. The cinematography reinforces those ideas, cinematographer Lev Predan Kowarski and director Marčetič box the image into a narrower aspect ratio, while favouring wide lenses and compositions filled with empty space. A stylistic streak that is compounded by everything happening at night, where people and life seem strangely absent from the world. There are a handful of businesses that occupy the movie, yet they have no customers, the streets are deserted – it creates a feeling of isolation that becomes central to the movies’ identity. Of course there could be another reason for all that, it’s cheaper to produce, but I prefer to believe in the version that sets up a feeling of wonder and otherness as it serves the movie better.

Returning to the cinematography, as its hugely responsible for the tone of the project being as successful as it is. The lighting contributes enormously to that atmosphere, streetlights bathe scenes in harsh artificial colours, creating an environment that feels faintly sickly and detached from reality. There is little sense of elaborate lighting setups; instead, they appear to be committed to the idea of natural light sources, or at least the convincing imitation of them. Combined that with an abundance of backlighting, it creates a visual language that feels dreamlike and oddly grounded. I mean, everywhere with street houses and multi-stories looks like this when they are quiet at night, so it’s perfectly normal, but the cinematography just makes it all pop.

What makes the central dynamic work is that there is nothing remotely romantic about it, whilst Rok and Iza are of a similar age their connection develops along entirely different lines. Iza is a force of nature, throwing herself into increasingly absurd acts of vigilantism with boundless energy. Rok, meanwhile, eventually gives up stealing altogether to instead become her official sidekick, because “helping people simply makes him feel good”. The complication, of course, is that he is also the person who stole her beloved bicycle. Whether he is unable to admit the truth or is enjoying himself in the fantasy of it all remains to be seen, either way, he instead creates an alternate narrative, positioning the ridiculous bedroom supervillain he put together as a rival figure to Iza, going as far as building a mythology for his maverick alter ego. The inevitable collision between those two threads provides much of the film’s dramatic weight. In another film, the resulting irony might be devastating. Here, it plays in a deadpan register that recalls many comic Scandinavian voices. A humour that never comes from punchlines but from quiet awkwardness – and just to stress here, it’s way too low-key to come close to the notion of cringe comedy.

That blend of the mundane and the fantastical is where Girl in the Night becomes most interesting. On paper, it contains vigilantes, heroes and people who may or may not be capable of flight, whereas in practice, the crimes involve stolen bicycles, lost pets, and neighbourhood disputes. It all carries the feeling of children playing at heroics, particularly through Rok’s increasingly awkward attempts to build a friendship with Iza. And as anyone who has watched children play knows, even harmless games eventually lead to somebody getting hurt. With all this, Marčetič’s movie remains committed to that balance. The recurring joke that Iza can only fly when nobody is looking perfectly encapsulates its worldview. Everything is playful, but also tinged with sadness, everything is fantastical, but also grounded in loneliness. From other visits across Europe from my years on the festival circuit, this all feels alike so many contemporary Scandinavian, Eastern European and even Russian genre films which span the divide between melancholy and whimsy. Honestly, it’s a delightful micro-genre.

Slow but deliberate, dark but oddly childish, Girl in the Night is full of fascinating contradictions. Even the final gesture between Rok and Iza is small, quiet and benign, yet charged with a surprisingly intense emotional undercurrent. It’s an unusual film with a lot of flavour, although I’m not entirely convinced that flavour will appeal to the broadest audience. Then again, that’s precisely the sort of fantastique cinema that festivals like Fantastic Fest champion, and when viewed through that lens, Girl in the Night is exactly the kind of discovery that makes digging through the more obscure corners of a festivals programme so worthwhile.

Girl in the Night won best picture at Fantastic Fest*

That kind of just undercuts that whole last paragraph, huh, oh well, I’m glad people loved it.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – GIRL IN THE NIGHT