Review of The Night Listener

The Night Listener is essentially quite straightforward: a study in obsession and loneliness. The two protagonists are almost mirror images of each other, one an ageing homosexual writer and the other an attention-seeking fantasist. It was billed, by some, as a thriller, and consequently criticised for not being very thrilling, not being very mysterious and, finally, not really having a story. Certainly, there is no resolution to 'the story' as such, but then whether of not the young boy existed is not relevant. What is relevant is that the storyteller, whose younger lover has left him, desperately wants there to be a boy, desperately wants to have a son. The other obsessive, a woman who apparently invents the boy to get attention, will do anything to keep the fiction going. The film plays trick a little viewer and I cannot make up my mind whether it does so fairly or not. So, for example, we are shown the fictional boy talking to the storyteller on the phone and then handing the receiver to the obsessive woman. So, it would seem, and do the film would have us believe, he really did exist. Yet he didn't: he really is just a vehicle for the obsessive to get the attention she craves. A final scene confirms it: at the end of the film she has moved to another town to start a new life, is no longer blind and the fictional boy in her life is no longer the victim of paedophile parents, but has lost a leg. Finally, of course, it doesn't matter whether or not the film plays fair. Its essence is to portray the private despair of an essentially decent man whom life is slowly but surely passing by. If you read other reviews, you will hear it claimed that The Night Listener is a cracking thriller or, alternatively, not worth a minute of the running time. Both views are wrong, but more to the point mistake, The Night Listener is a gentle film in which the storyteller finds some sort of peace, if only an acceptance that he is getting older and that life is not always as accommodating as we fondly wish. Furthermore, the film is beautifully shot in dark browns of different hues, in shadows, at night. Daylight and light generally play no part in the storyteller's world. Very little is distinct, and ironically the only real understanding and openness comes from two younger characters who are sceptical of the boys existence from the start. This is a slow-moving, in many ways uneventful film which succeeds because it doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is: an examination of obsession and loneliness. If you like a certain kind of film, you will like it. Williams is very good in portraying the storyteller's loneliness and Toni Collette also turns in a good performance. If you want a thriller, forget it. There is so much more to this film than that.