Looks can be deceiving, never judge a book by its cover, etc. Trite, yes, but also true. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve passed up a film because the thumbnail art or blurb seemed too cliched or too obvious. And I’m probably missing out on some good sleeper hits because of that, but I run across enough mediocre, disappointing movies writing this thing as it is, if I can avoid another one I’m going to. It’s a gamble, so I sometimes rely on the opinions of a few people I know, and if they like something, whatever its initial impression, I’ll give it a chance.
I’ve flipped past Last Shift any number of times - generic Saw-ish artwork, a pentagram featured heavily, something about an “unspeakable evil.” Pretty generic as these things go. But it’s also one of those films that keep coming up when people whose opinion I trust talk about good, solid horror films, so I gave it a shot, and damned if it isn’t just that. It’s creepy and intense, very well paced, and a lot of why it works is the way it plays with appearances.
Officer Jessica Loren is a rookie police officer in Sanford, Florida. She’s following in her father’s footsteps, much to her mother’s dismay, and the film opens with her mother pleading to her over the phone not to go into work that night. Her father died in the line of duty, so you can understand why her mother is worried for her. But Jessica’s intent on living up to her father’s legacy, even if that means drawing the short straw and getting the unenviable detail of being the lone officer on the last overnight shift at Sanford’s old police station, in the process of being shuttered in favor of a bigger, fancier building across town. It’s just going to be her, an empty building, and an evidence room that now houses only evidence classified as biohazardous. A disposal team will be by sometime between 4 and 7am, she just needs to sit tight to let them in and to make sure the building stays secure. And at first, it’s just boredom, boredom, a vagrant who manages to break in, and more boredom.
Then the strange noises start. Things moving on their own. Doors opening and closing. And calls from a young woman who claims she’s being held captive.
Except all 911 calls have already been routed to the new station.
This film does a lot of things right, and the first is the setting. The film takes place entirely inside an actual abandoned police station, and it helps a great deal, as location shooting often does. First, it feels like an actual police station instead of someone’s approximation. In a lot of ways, it’s just another disused office building, blandly institutional, with the occasional detail like holding cells and interrogation rooms, and the space is believable - it has an actual geography, it’s clear it isn’t a series of sets. Likewise, it feels authentically abandoned, emptied out but for some forgotten office furniture, a single phone, litter dotting rooms and hallways. There’s a very particular spookiness that you get in office buildings in the middle of the night - it’s a place that is normally full and busy, and now it’s empty and quiet, so any sound or thing out of place becomes very unsettling. It doesn’t take much to freak you out when you’re supposed to be alone in the building, and the first act especially gets a lot of mileage out of those little things that suggest that maybe Jessica isn’t alone after all. The tension starts from the opening minutes as Jessica encounters the duty sergeant that she’s relieving, an empty hallway and silence interrupted by a string of profanities. It’s something that serves the opening of the film well - stretches of silence interrupted by sudden, unexpected sounds. It’s minimal, but it keeps you on edge.
So that’s the next strength of this film - the pacing is spot-on, across the film and from moment-to-moment. It starts quietly spooky right off the bat and then steady, gradually escalates and increases the tension as the film goes on. There are a number of different things in play at first - odd noises, things moving by themselves, the mysterious caller, and as the film progresses and we learn more about what happened in this station maybe a year or so before, and with these revelations more and more gets added to the mix, taking things from subtle, minimal expressions of tension to something more explicit, raising the stakes. A lot of the escalation works because the filmmakers are extremely good at shot composition, camera angles and camera movement to build tension and pay it off. There are some moments that could be classified as jump scares, but they don’t hew to the conventional rhythms of jump scares so they’re surprisingly effective.
Like, as long as I’m talking about this in terms of rhythm, the thing that occurred to me while I was watching this was that the filmmakers were really good at playing around the beat - instead of hitting moments exactly where you’d expect them, they come up a little earlier, or a little later, or from a different angle than the audience has come to expect. This film is really good at dodging predictability in the moment-to-moment action, and it escalates things gradually over its runtime, so we start at low-key unsettling and end up with something relentless and nightmarish by the third act. It’s a constant tightening of the screws, gathering steam pretty much from the first scene, and thought it relies on fairly conventional horror film techniques, these techniques are employed inventively enough that you don’t really become complacent.
The cinematography makes really good use not just of camera angles and movement but also lighting - it’s an empty building in the middle of the night, so you’ve got fluorescent lighting in the hallways and then dark empty rooms in the doorways beyond, and the film does a lot with light and shadow, with the transition from light to shadow, what happens when you turn the lights on in dark rooms, and reveals in dark areas with stuttering, intermittent light sources. None of it is especially innovative but it’s executed really, really well - I almost want to say tastefully, but that’s not it - the filmmakers are really good about not using the same trick a whole bunch. They mix it up a lot, which helps maintain the tension because it’s tough to predict where the film’s going to go next in the moment-to-moment action. It’s not afraid to use different narrative techniques, employing flashbacks that sort of organically weave in and out of the story, getting the most of their single location. The music is mostly tastefully minimal, with the very occasional sting here and there, but again, it works because it’s employed thoughtfully and not just slathered over every scene.
Basically - and I think this is really important, and something that a lot of people who make horror films miss - this is a film that isn’t occupied with telling us when we should be scared, it just lets things play out and trusts that we’ll be paying sufficient attention to be scared by what we see, and it makes all the difference. The performances are serviceable, maybe a little on the stagy side in places, but not so much that it’s distracting, and the dialogue is kind of corny and affected in places, but again it’s rarely distracting. Though it’s clear this film didn’t have a very large budget, the filmmakers do a very good job for the most part at putting the money where it matters and coming up with striking imagery to really carry the important moments.
There are a couple of problems - there’s one bit of makeup work that doesn’t quite land as well as it could (though the camera’s not on it long enough to really make it a big problem) and there’s a big exposition dump at the beginning of the second act that feels really, really clumsy. To be fair, I’ve tried to think of ways it could have been handled better, and it’s tough to come up with a solution. Essentially we have to be clued in on a series of events that the protagonist already knows about (though the narrative sometimes wavers on things you’d think she would know but doesn’t) and I’m not sure if it’d land right if it were treated more obliquely. There’s going to have to be some suspension of disbelief around Jessica’s behavior - she doesn’t have a clearly described arc so much as she sort of wavers between behaving rationally and irrationally, though they do a good job of establishing reasons why she might not make the obvious choices, and supernatural fuckery puts paid to simple things like using phones or radios for communication or sometimes even making the rational choices.
None of this is remotely close to fatal to the movie though, because it has such strong momentum and verve that you just sort of get swept up in the nightmare. Some of the most effective moments in this film have to do with appearances, with what we see and how that will be suddenly reversed or subverted - you think you know what’s happening or about to happen, but you don’t, and that’s where a lot of the power of this film is, and I gotta say, that’s more than appropriate for a film I was willing to pass over because it looked like something more generic.
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