The long awaited feature length debut of talented filmaker Oliver Smolders. Black Night is mysterious, ghostly, technically impeccable, and continously bathed in magical, surreal light. In a world overtaken by eternal darkness, the buttoned down entomologist abandons his phantoms to embrace the unknown. Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez) is a conservator at the Natural Science Museum, and spends most of his days surrounded by bugs. When Oscar isn't tending to the tiny specimens that line his home and workplace, he can frequently be found reflecting on his childhood traumas in the psychiatrist's office. One day, Oscar returns home from work to find an African woman from the museum lying in his bed. From what Oscar can gather the woman is suffering from a mysterious ailment, and has come to his bed to die. Instinctively, the couple makes love as Oscar struggles to maintain himself in a mysterious gray zone between repulsion and desire. Soon thereafter, the woman begins to experience a disturbing transformation.


"Black Night" is a delirious, trippy delight of a picture. Influences range from Peter Greenaway to David Lynch to Guy Madden to the Quay brothers. Fans of any or all of these auteurs definitely need to check this picture out. The videography is sumptuous and the set pieces, for the most part, are dazzling. And much like Lynch at his best, the picture really is a series of erotic and esoteric set pieces that come together to tell a strange tale set in a very strange land and peopled with some very strange characters. Exotic insects and the haunting set design help to evoke a skewed parallel-reality and are a feast - and a treat - for the eyes of viewers hungry for new atmospheric adventures. Alternately enchanting and horrifying, "Black Night" leaves the viewer with an aftertaste akin to that of having sipped some kind of dream-inducing tonic in a far off mystical land; the visions end, but an unsettling strangeness lingers.