Cold Comes the Night is a 2013 film directed, and co-written, by Tze Chun. The reviews I've seen have been rather mixed, and I find this rather hard to understand, since in my opinion this is a gripping thriller, and the audience never quite knows for sure where the meandering, but intriguing, storyline will lead. I felt that there were some original features to the story that were pretty impressive.
One of the attractive features of the film is that it has a heroine who sometimes behaves in a way that we simply do not associate with heroines. Alice Eve (yes, daughter of Trevor Eve, the one-time star of Shoestring) plays Chloe a single mother who runs a disreputable motel in a down-at-heel area. She is having an affair with a crooked police officer and is trying to make enough money to be able to take her young daughter somewhere safer and more appealing.
Topo, a gangster from Eastern Europe, played by Bryan Cranston, crosses her path with disastrous consequences. He has been hired to take some money to a villainous young crook, but when his driver is killed after a row with a prostitute at Chloe's motel, Topo loses the cash and has to threaten Chloe into helping him to retrieve it. His problem is that he is nearly blind, and this means that he needs her as much as she needs a share of that missing money.. A strange, yet oddly plausible, relationship develops between Chloe and Topo, and this adds a layer of complexity and interest to the film.
I really liked the way that, at times, the script made me root for Chloe and Topo as they embark on their hazardous quest, whilst not shrinking from the reality that each of them has a dark side. This is clever writing. From start to finish, I really wanted to know what happened next. This is a really entertaining movie, and I feel that it is undeservedly under-estimated.
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