Ken Barber (Geno Walker) is a reclusive divorcee who has taken to not leaving his apartment, preferring to use the internet to order what he needs, and making a tiny income with his online self-help videos, detailing business and lawn care. He is in contact with others through the benefits of online chatting, such as his best friend Terry (Felonious Munk) who is one of the few who watches his videos and offers advice on them, and also his ex-wife Kelsey (Kate Arrington) and her new husband Isaac (Michael Shannon) who try to encourage Ken to live a more normal life. This advice falls on deaf ears, as Ken is more keen to perform taxidermy on small birds or count down from ten repeatedly...
But the real trigger for the plot of this daft horror was a stuffed bird falling off a shelf. This happens while Ken is recording a video, and while he only notices when Terry points it out, we are asked to believe this act of simple gravity is evidence of a demonic haunting; perhaps it was a commentary on the mentally ill going down rabbit holes of pointless accruing of information, but it's doubtful. It was more likely to be one of the most casually desperate starting points for a horror movie plot of its era, though we could see what the real starting point was. Yes, it was pandemic horror time again, and while some directors could make something of having its cast sat at home peering into their laptop cameras to gather online footage, Jennifer Reeder here just didn't have the tools at her disposal.
This meant we were offered samey shots of her leading man performing repetitive tasks, which was presumably to underline the monotony of his existence and how he felt safe cocooned in that, but did not translate into nailbiting suspense for the audience. The online chats were not much better, and you were more probably wondering how Michael Shannon (and his actual wife) got involved with this - there did seem to be some favours being paid here, with connections to Chicago's theatre scene. But this did have a point to reach, and it was all to do with Ken's research (online, of course) into his apartment where it is revealed to him out of the blue that over a hundred years ago there was an axe murderer living there, and as if that were not dramatic enough someone committed suicide by jumping from the window of his base of operations.
This factoid is somewhat undercut by the revelation at the end that Ken lives on the ground floor, so that must have been one determined suicide, but the damage has been done and Ken gets in contact with a Colin Wilson-style occult writer (Lawrence Grimm) who offers to exorcise the apartment for him. Bear in mind the place wouldn't need to be exorcised had Terry not made such a big deal of a stuffed bird falling over, but it's too late, Ken is now getting hammering on his front door that cannot be happening, and in general Night's End has been riffing on a male version of Roman Polanski's Repulsion, which curiously had become a touchstone for this period of horror where not being able to go out was apparently a reason to go crazy instead. By the time Ken is on an internet broadcast at the insistence of the writer, another influence made itself plain: Americans had discovered Ghostwatch, the BBC's notoriously fright-inducing play that somehow fooled a lot of people that their TVs were possessed despite being clearly labelled as fiction. This is even less sensible than that, and although visual effects are expensive, the CGI heavy climax here did look like a nineties heavy metal video, and not in a good way.
[NIGHT'S END WILL PREMIERE
ON SHUDDER ON MARCH 31ST 2022.]
