Night Always Comes, just like this crime drama's next predictable plot point

Here, Kirby plays Lynette, a struggling woman juggling a pair of crappy jobs (factory and bar shifts) and a looming financial deadline. The walls are closing in, this beaten-over-the-head obviousness hammered by the scene-setting talk radio that opens her morning. Its message: The economy is in shambles. To humanize this point, Lynette, her erratic mom Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who has a developmental disability, are on the brink of eviction, and on the cusp of finally securing some stable housing. But that hope is quickly punctured, their loan falling through thanks to Doreen’s arbitrary selfishness. It’s all set-up for the story’s simple premise: Lynette needs to get her hands on $25,000 by the next morning.

Thus her quest begins, broken up by timecards ticking down to 9 AM. What initially feints at realistic drama concerned with the slippery and one-way slope into poverty—a film concerned with the qualities, circumstances, or crises that quickly yet permanently define people as unemployable or untrustworthy in the eyes of capitalism—becomes a low-rent sojourn into an unimaginative criminal underworld. Kirby is the sole guiding force throughout the film, initially tempering her desperation before falling fully into her character’s dark past. 

But she’s also the only character here. Lynette speedruns a slew of schemes, most of which are enabled by the racist idea that the one Black character in the movie (her new co-worker Cody, played by Stephen James) is connected to every kind of criminal who’d be helpful to the plot. Though a stranger to Lynette, Cody becomes her magical fix-it accomplice, someone who knows a guy who’ll crack a stolen safe and a guy who’d buy a hot Mercedes. Kenny is similarly reduced; unlike his breakout role in The Peanut Butter Falcon, here Gottsagen is used as a prop, just one more plot point for Lynette to keep track of. This shallowness becomes more apparent as the expanding plot spreads everything thin. As Lynette tools around Portland, she flips through her seemingly endless rolodex of creepy contacts (Michael Kelly, Eli Roth), who dole out small hits of aid and overdoses of exposition. Julia Fox, playing an old escort buddy who secured a sugar daddy, is the only actor to actually make something of her small role, as messily scene-stealing as ever.

It’s all more than a little goofy, the broadness clashing with Kirby’s trauma-mining performance (one that never finds the engrossing focus of something like Pieces Of A Woman) and Caron’s matter-of-fact direction, which elides fancy camera moves for mostly static fare—though shots designed around reflections or framed through high-rise windows add a bit of big-city polish unfit for the tale’s grimy trajectory. It’s this inability to reconcile tone and subject that cheapens Night Always Comes, turning a tale with bigger things on its mind into a trite, familiar breaking-bad narrative that only namechecks reality.

Director: Benjamin Caron
Writer: Sarah Conradt
Starring: Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zack Gottsagen, Stephen James, Randall Park, Julia Fox, Michael Kelly, Eli Roth
Release Date: August 15, 2025 (Netflix)