From writer-director Renuka Jeyapalan, Stay the Night (2022) is a slice-of-life romance focusing on one afternoon and evening in Toronto. Grace (Andrea Bang) is a reserved, slightly awkward, H.R. specialist at a big firm. She loses out on a promotion, has a fight with her roommate, and generally feels awful. Across town, NHL player Carter (Joe Scarpellino) learns right before a game that he’s demoted to the minors. Effective immediately. He’s crushed, and suddenly adrift in an unknown city. By chance, or maybe fate, both Grace and Carter arrive at a bar downtown, abandoned by their friends. When Carter hops into Grace’s cab in an effort to avoid an aggressive fan, the unlikely pair start out on a night together that will take them all over the city as they learn about each other, and where their lives might turn next.
Stay the Night is a two-hander romance in the classical sense. With shades of David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Jeyapalan’s script does away with any trace of plot bloat that might obscure from the central goal of exploring every wrinkle of Grace and Carter’s night together. The result is about as slow-burn as you can get with a feature romance, and it works wonderfully. Jeyapalan’s approach grants space to the moments between major scenes, the beats often lost in the process of delivering a broader romantic drama or comedy. We watch Grace and Carter walk from one bar or restaurant to the other, lingering in the silence, comfortable and otherwise, that’s inevitable when two people are still feeling each other out. In fact, I quite loved how Jeyapalan actively included awkwardness between the leads, a choice that heightened the tender relatability inherent in Stay the Night.
Bang and Scarpellino’s chemistry sells all these moments. Their progression from strangers to, well, I’ll let you find out what exactly, is utterly charming. The two deliver the most important component of any romance picture which is the audience’s urge to root for them and simply want to spend time with them. Bang, in particular, probably best known for her work on Kim’s Convenience (2016-2021), is exquisite. Her opening scenes, where she learns of her missed promotion and quietly cries on the bus, are studies in micro-emotions. One of the great joys of Stay the Night is watching her take Grace from a moment of utter defeat through a journey of self-discovery that winds up with her finally comprehending who exactly she deserves to be. Scarpellino can’t match her dynamism, missing the mark in a handful of scenes, but nothing that ruins their central connection.
Directorially, Jeyapalan locates a moody and rich aesthetic for her performers to live in. With the majority of the film happening in the evening, night, and wee hours of the morning, Jeyapalan has a great deal of darkness to work with. She leans in, reveling in Toronto’s shadows without ever making them seem threatening. Instead, there’s a sense of possibility in the unrevealed, a visual choice that matches the narrative quite well. She and cinematographer Conor Fisher also have a knack for picking key colors for each location, resulting in a veritable rainbow of striking palettes. The first restaurant Grace and Carter visit gets the warm treatment, glowing with a rich yellow hue, matched in beauty by the moonlight blue that fills nearly every sequence in Grace’s apartment. Jeyapalan does fall into a repetitive shot-reverse-shot style for their conversations, but that recedes the deeper into the film we get.
Stay the Night delivers the warm embrace of a film content to linger in the many shades of connection and attraction. We love watching visions of romance because they capture human passion at its most sincere. Grace and Carter’s night not to forget results in a movie to remember for the rest of us.
Stay the Night was viewed in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2022.
Director: Renuka Jeyapalan
Writer: Renuka Jeyapalan
Rated: NR
Runtime: 94m
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
