Review: The Night Clerk

Tye Sheridan plays the title hotel clerk who suffers from an extreme case of Asperger’s Syndrome. He also has secret surveillance cameras so he can watch people and learn/mimic their behaviour. He says it’s to help him learn how to communicate better with others. He lives with his well-meaning but enabling mother (Helen Hunt) and spends most of his non-work time in the basement watching the camera feeds. Sheridan goes home after his shift one night and notices a hotel guest being attacked by an unidentified male. He rushes back to the hotel only to find the woman dead. An investigating cop (John Leguizamo) finds Sheridan immediately suspicious, and finds it difficult to get straight answers out of him. Ana de Armas plays a sweet hotel guest who is experienced with people with Asperger’s, and whom Sheridan develops a fondness for. Jonathon Schaech plays the husband of the dead woman.

 

Wanna see an oddball blend of “Rain Man” and a sexless “Sliver”? Yeah, me neither. Writer-director Michael Cristofer makes his first film since 2001’s flop “Original Sin” (he also made the decent TV movie biopic “Gia” and scripted the megaflop “Bonfire of the Vanities”) and it’s incredibly awkward and unsatisfying. Sheridan tries really hard, Ana de Armas is charismatic as hell, and John Leguizamo isn’t bad as the pushy cop. However, this is unconvincing and more than a little on the nose in the way that it makes Sheridan’s character seem rather creepy and stalker-ish. I didn’t buy a moment of it, all of the camera surveillance stuff and relationship between Sheridan and mum Helen Hunt just seemed too wacky to me. What planet was her character supposed to be on?

 

How about we get a nice film charting the sweet romance between Sheridan and de Armas, in spite of his very serious Asperger’s? Nah, let’s involve him in a murder plot instead and make him out to be a tad creepy. It all adds up to…hardly anything at all, really. I’m not quite sure what the point of it all was. Hard pass, though it’s not the fault of the two main stars. They can’t do anything with the awful script.

 

Rating: D+

 

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