Late Night With The Devil

There are so many layers to Late Night With The Devil that it would take a long time to tire of rewatching it; indeed, one might argue that it gets better with each viewing as new details come to light, as new interpretations emerge from the beautifully nuanced performances. This release includes an extensive suite of extras to round out the viewing experience. The quality of these varies, but there’s still enough good stuff to add hours of enjoyment.

The audio commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson situates the film in the Australian horror tradition, adding layers of context that it’s easy for international viewers to have missed, before going on to add depth to multiple aspects of the production. It helps to contextualise the behind the scenes footage and the music feature also included here, which have no commentary of their own, and may also help you to identify important moments in the film that you’ve missed, though it can’t catch all of them.

The interview with directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes runs a little long at 45 minutes, with some internal repetition, but it’s still full of fascinating anecdotes and it establishes just how much luck was involved in the whole thing coming together as well as it did, emphasising the small budget and tight shooting schedule. The interviews with the actors are a treat and bring out new dimensions in the performances. You may also feel a few hairs stand up on the back of your neck when young Ingrid Torelli describes how she had an out of body experience during her pivotal possession scene.

The feature on cults is, sadly, a disappointment. Its failures can be summed up by the claim that cults have been an cultural concern “since the Satanic Panic of the Eighties...” which elides, at a stroke, everything from Charles Manson to Father Divine to Helena Blavatsky – not to mention the groups which notoriously worried politicians and scholars in ancient Rome, Egypt and China. Whilst there is an interesting attempt here to apply real world context to the story in the film, it’s like listening to a high schooler trying to deliver a doctoral thesis, complete with wild mispronunciations of words like ‘faux’ and ‘deity’ that will leave you wondering if the narrator has ever had a real world conversation with anybody on this topic.

Fortunately, this is the only real weak link in an otherwise appealing package. The final feature, an on-stage talk filmed at South by Southwest 2023, has some slight sound issues but is both informative and entertaining. It gives the final word to star David Dastmalchian, whose surprise and delight at the experience of making the film echoes the magic that makes it such a pleasure to watch.