The line between historical recreation and genre reimagining has seldom been as effectively blurred as in It Would Be Night in Caracas.” A pacy thriller, based on Karina Sainz Borgo’s novel, the film mines pulpy pleasures from an apocalyptic vision of Venezuela’s 2017 riots. Those unfamiliar with the nation’s recent (and ongoing) unrest can simply enjoy an expertly tooled dystopian rollercoaster ride. But planted deep within the taut setpieces and propulsive plotting, there’s grief of a subtler, agonizingly relatable kind: for a country turning so hostile against its citizenry that fleeing becomes the only option. Home is sometimes where the heartbreak is.
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Adelaida (an excellent Natalia Reyes), her heart already cracked, her expression dazed and numb, is picked out by Juan Pablo Ramírez’ impressively dynamic yet controlled camera through a chanting throng of protesters waving flags and fists in the air. She barely notices the clamor; she is waiting to accompany her mother’s coffin to its final resting place. At the cemetery, she drives past an anarchic biker gang funeral, where liquored-up women writhe and grind on a comrade’s casket. The dissonance between their bacchanalian ritual and Adelaida’s silent, solitary suffering is marked, and the disrespect for the dead further underlined when a gravedigger tersely shoos her away from the graveside, reminding her that the area is unsafe, especially at nightfall.
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Adelaida holes up in her mother’s apartment, unable to bring herself to pack up or even sort through her things, ignoring the banging and shouting from the street below. But after one of her infrequent forays into the neighborhood — for basics that are in scant supply on the balding shelves of the few stores that remain open — she returns to discover that a faction of the self-ordained resistance militia, headed by the fearsome Mariscala (Sheila Monterola), has simply commandeered the flat. Added to the trauma of grief and sudden eviction under threat of reprisal, Adelaida has to endure seeing the sacred mementos of her mother’s life trashed by the thuggish new squatters.
She can’t bring herself leave the building, nor has she anywhere else to go. So she seeks refuge in a neighbor’s apartment, only to discover the occupant dead on the kitchen floor. For perhaps the first, but definitely not the last time, Adelaida’s opportunism surprises even herself when she chooses to take advantage of this convenient tragedy. She stealthily moves into the dead woman’s space — into her life, really — spying on the interlopers across the hall and biding her time until they get bored and leave, or maybe until they kill each other in some internecine power-grab or other. It’s a lonely vigil, with only flashback memories of her mother and an old lover (Edgar Ramirez) to keep her company. But then Santiago (Moisés Angola), the brother of a friend whom she had believed incarcerated, shows up and Adelaida reluctantly shelters him.
For a thriller so nervily edited by Soledad Salfate and so atmospherically shot — Ramirez’ camera is especially eloquent in low-light and night-time situations, when the line between reality and nightmare gets fuzzy — it is surprisingly ambivalent about the politics of this specific moment in Venezuela’s recent past. That might frustrate viewers looking for a more straightforward arc of political awakening leading to some self-sacrificing action heroics on Adelaida’s part. But Adelaida is not interested in being a hero. Broken heart or no, she is interested in surviving.
There is nuance, too, in the odd phrasing of the title, with that “would be” making the whole narrative feel conditional, allegorical, symbolic. At the same time, it suggests a certain wistfulness, as though Caracas were just an idea, a place that no longer exists, or that exists solely in the musings of exiles sitting in far-off time zones, looking out into the daylight and imagining the night-sky stars of home.
To be clear, there is no sense that Rondón and Ugás are defending the old guard or suggesting that a docile, starving population pinioned under the grip of a dictatorship is big-picture preferable to a rebellious insurgency. But their pacy storytelling does give us a first-person, on-the-ground experience of how terrifying it can be when nominal allies reveal themselves to be as petty, cruel and corrupt as the powerholders they oppose. Sometimes, the righteous fury of an oppressed population is unleashed, only to find that there is nowhere for it to go, except to turn savagely in on itself. In such cases, solidarity and compassion themselves might seem like luxuries next to the all-conquering, primally selfish urge to save your own skin. Before you judge Adelaida too harshly, remember it’s a choice that far too many of us, in collapsing communities and besieged cities across the world, may soon face.
