Late Night with the Devil (2024)

A 1977 late-night talk show host, his ratings slipping, invites a possessed thirteen-year-old onto the broadcast, and the evening deteriorates with admirable efficiency. The Cairnes brothers have built a tight, cruel little machine out of analog horror and period furniture, and David Dastmalchian holds it together with a performance pitched exactly between smarmy and wounded. The film is not interested in instructing anyone. It wants to unsettle, and it does, mostly through craft: practical effects, a glowing VHS sheen, and a finale that abandons the found-footage conceit for something stranger and worse.

On the matter of social consciousness, there is remarkably little to file. The casting is quietly international, with performers of Middle Eastern descent in prominent roles, but the film never pauses to remark on it, which is its own kind of confidence. Laura Gordon's parapsychologist is competent and unremarked upon as a woman, right up until the demon dispatches her, so the gender politics amount to an accident of staffing. There is no racial commentary, no environmental sermon, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent arc. The film's single glancing gesture toward the powerful comes in the form of The Grove, a cabal of wealthy men trading souls for ratings. It reads as a Faustian fable about ambition, not an economic indictment, and the distinction matters.

What remains is a stylish, cynical entertainment that trusts its audience to draw conclusions without assistance. The Satanic Panic of the era supplies atmosphere, not a history lesson, and no actual events are reinterpreted for our edification. The moral, such as it is, arrives through plot, not podium. We are left with a host who traded his wife for a timeslot and a broadcast that ends with the words So It Is Done. A tidy evening's work, and a welcome reminder that horror can still be nasty without being preachy.