Locarno Review: At Night Is a Dreamy, Soothing Feature Debut

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The best movie I’ve seen in Locarno this year is set in Paris after dark, on sleepy side streets, in fluorescent eateries and nocturnal cafes and bars. At Night_ plays at the unhurried clip of a Rachel Cusk novel, and with similar shades of that author’s displaced POV and melancholic allure. As its images wash over you, you get a sense of an artist yearning for somewhere else while remaining resolutely curious for what’s around the corner.

The film marks the debut feature of Beatrice Gibson, a two-time Tiger Award winner for best short film in IFFR and a sometime-collaborator of Sean Price Williams (I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead) and Ben Rivers (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters)—the latter of whom also shot this one. Dreamy and elusive, it’s the kind of film that wouldn’t look out of place in Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, yet feels quite at home in Locarno’s Cineastí del Presente sidebar—much like Blue Heron premiering here last year before it went out to travel the world.

In many ways, Gibson’s and Romvari’s cinema are nothing alike, yet similar levels of warmth and ideas can be found within. The travelogues of Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker, of course, came to mind, yet Gibson’s debut quickly finds its own shapes and rhythms. Much credit for this can go to the collective—a collaborative mood that’s exemplified by a wonderful early sequence wherein six women sit in a café and stage a stirring, ten-minute dialectic on sex, age, and desire.

For the most part, the film follows two of them: the first a British director named B (played by Gibson) who opens the film in voiceover—a call home to her partner that begins with her talking about location-scouting and leads to an admission of creative block. The other central character is a single mother, Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), with whom the film spends a little more time, tagging along to various locations and listening in as she gets into conversations about privilege and class. Here and there, the other women from the café reappear like a reminder of universal experiences and solidarity.

Despite the London-based Gibson’s outsider POV, the film relies on precisely zero of Paris’ snapshot locations to give it a sense of place—aside from a few underground train carriages and one inviting-looking metro stop. In their place, we get to see a group of men shoot pool in a Chinese restaurant; workers closing up fluorescent storefronts; a host of sleepy, lamp-lit streets; as well as a peak into the artist’s dressing room at a queer venue, which leads to a evocative performance by the singer Adam Christensen and composer Elvin Brandhi, who also provides the film’s score.

Along with B, Didi and the French capitol, At Night is also a film about poetry. Gibson opens with a quote from Alice Notley, an American writer who died last year, and includes a lovely recording of her reciting from that same poem, The Descent of Alette, during one of B’s sleepier metro rides. The English poet Sophie Robinson is also amongst the cast, and there’s a great close-up of her giving a reading. True to that form, At Night has little resembling a central arc, which can leave a forgivable sense of slack, but the film’s steady flow of words and ideas, combined with Rivers’ exquisite 16mm images, are more than enough to maintain its soothing hold. I barely noticed the time go by.

_At Night _premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.