I’ve always had a great affection for what could be called the midnight odyssey genre, which theoretically covers films as disparate as Adventures in Babysitting and Eyes Wide Shut. Into The Night had a troubled production and indeed the resulting film is a queer duck, a mix of Hitchcockian thriller, satire, romantic comedy, and a kind of wry existential joke. It works – it captures the state of sleeplessness, where the world feels both utterly surreal and yet also utterly inconsequential, better than any film before Lost In Translation, so the film’s bizarre clashes of tone and plot make perfect sense filtered through John Landis’ deadpan reproduction of Goldblum’s alienated perspective. The film ends up being perversely exhilarating, with Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer both being at the height of their charm.
