“The Night” (2020) is a psychological horror-thriller film directed by Kourosh Ahari, marking his directorial debut. It is an American-Iranian production, starring both Iranian and American actors. The film had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in January 2020 with its public release in theaters a year later. It is Shahab Hosseini’s inaugural acting role in the United States and he won the Jury Prize for Best Actor at the Molins Film Festival in 2020. It is also the first American production to receive permission for theatrical release in Iran since 1979.

British film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a score of 4 stars out of 5, writing: “there’s nothing obviously new about The Night. But it is put together with great style, force and visual imagination, and Ahari deftly uses the couple’s baby to ratchet up the tension.”

Spanish film critic Carlos Aguilar wrote for the Los Angeles Times, noting the film’s similarities to “The Shining” and “Under the Shadow”, but added: “Ahari finds his own narrative rhythm, though it feels sluggish in a final act that fluctuates from frantic to meditative.” He concluded that the film “is at its most effectively unsettling when the focus is to evoke fear as opposed to when it physically shows what’s haunting the characters trapped in their respective secret tragedies.”

P.S. Among the American actors of this film is Gia Mora, with whom Hosseini later got to work on feature films “The Writer Is Dead” and “The Last Act”.