Night Film: A Novel

Night Film: A Novel is a mystery thriller by Marisha Pessl published by Random House. The novel won a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award ^[1] and was ranked sixth on The New York Times Bestseller’s list in September 2013^[2] following its release in August 2013.
The novel uses screenshots of author created web pages, and has an interactive aspect that involves an app called “Night Film Decoder” that is used to scan certain images used throughout the text and unlock additional text, pdf, video, and audio files that augment the text. However, many of the reviewers who did not like the novel believed that Pessl’s inclusion of the decoder was a significant drawback of the novel.

Plot

Ashley Cordova, the daughter of legendary reclusive director Stanislas Cordova, mysteriously commits suicide. With the belief that Stanislas Cordova was heavily involved in Ashley Cordova’s death, disgraced investigative journalist Scott McGrath reluctantly teams up with exuberant aspiring actress Nora Halliday, and the mysterious and aloof Hopper to determine what really happened. Throughout the investigation the trio interview a variety of people who were closely associated with both Stanislas Cordova and his daughter, only to discover that the truth of what happened may be beyond natural, scientific explanation.

Reviews and criticism

In his review of the novel titled “Underground Idol: Night Film: A Novel by Marisha Pessl” Joe Hill writes, “No one can accuse Marisha Pessl of unfamiliarity with the tools of the modern thriller. With pages of faked-up old photos, invented Web sites and satellite maps, “Night Film” — Pessl’s second novel, following ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ (2006) — asserts itself as a multimedia presentation more than an old-fashioned book.”.^[3] Hill notes that despite some of the clunky lines and oddly italicized sentences, the novel “has been precision-engineered to be read at high velocity, and its energy would be the envy of any summer blockbuster.”

Meg Wolitzer’s claims in her review, “Brainy, Fat And Full Of Ideas: 'Night Film' Is A Good-Natured Thriller”, that “In the novel’s best moments, reading this book is like sitting in a movie theater in wraparound darkness, feeling a deep chill that's part air conditioning, part anticipation.” ^[4] Wolitzer does note that while Pessl’s environments and scenes are beautifully rendered in the text, her characters fall flat. However, despite the plot’s plainness, and the characters’ lack of personalities, Wolitzer believes that “Marisha Pessl had an extremely cool and intricate idea for a novel, and ultimately it works. I was totally happy to sit in the darkness until the very last page, and I didn't move a muscle until the lights came up.”^[4] Despite the praise that critics gave Pessl, some critics felt that she did not successfully write a compelling mystery novel. Janet Maslin wrote in her review titled “This Time the Topic Is Movies” that in addition to purple prose, “credibility problems plague Ms. Pessl from the moment she first toots the Cordova horn. His films sound terrible, at least as they are described here. . . His last known interview, granted to Rolling Stone in 1977, is arrogant and pompous even for that magazine and time.”^[5] Maslin also does not believe that the interactive aspects of the novel are effective, and she views them as “a badly executed, distracting gimmick” that the audience is not guaranteed to want or enjoy.

In her article “The Novelist Goes to the Movies: Marisha Pessl's "Night Film", Maggie Doherty claims that Night Film: A Novel is “inexpertly plotted and peppered with screenshots, Night Film offers not an absorbing reading experience but an alienating one.”^[6] She also believes that “Night Film is a novel for the digital age, but if this is the kind of fiction our age produces, then these are dark times indeed,”^[6] and she links Night Film: A Novel to the death of the novel.

References

External links