Gone in the Night

Even when the story doesn’t pop, Ryder is terrific.

Twists galore follow, the torque of which surprises again and again.

Despite the star performance by Winona Ryder and an intriguing setup, Gone in the Night is destined to fade quickly from our memories.

Before its spectacularly messy finale, the head-scratching mystery thriller Gone in the Night holds itself together (barely) thanks to the star power of co-stars Winona Ryder and Dermot Mulroney.

What at first looks like a standard missing-person suspense tale turns out to have a more complicated agenda — but it is so haphazardly advanced and clumsily articulated, the film itself seems to be fumbling around for a cohering structure or mood.

The film’s ominous atmosphere derives less from the mystery of a disappearance and more from the scary business of getting older.

The good news is that Ryder is easily the best thing about Eli Horowitz’s debut feature, a twisty thriller that packs a lot of intelligent ideas into a puzzle structure that, somewhat counterintuitively, takes the viewer’s attention away from them.

This pseudo-genre fare can’t commit to much of anything and, as a result, becomes mostly nothing.

The premise is an overly familiar one, but one that could still work if we hadn't spent half the movie chasing red herrings that would've been a lot more interesting.

Gone in the Night is supposed to be a mystery thriller. But the only baffling mystery is how anyone involved in this tepid and messy dud of a movie thought that it was worth getting made. Winona Ryder fans, you've been warned.