‘At Night’ review: Experimental, allusive UK debut explores women’s shared experiences

Dir/scr: Beatrice Gibson. UK/France. 2026. 87mins

A chorus of female voices discussing women’s shared experiences are set against a collage of Paris at night in Beatrice Gibson’s atmospheric and allusive debut. The whisper of a plot, involving filmmaker B (played by Gibson herself) on a scouting trip for locations for her latest film, is essentially a loose framework on which to hang the various conversations about women’s lives. Gibson has built a reputation with her experimental shorts, including Rotterdam Tiger Award winners A Necessary Music (2009) and The Tiger’s Mind (2013), and At Night should have a healthy festival future after its premiere in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present.

The documentary aspect helps to ground the more experimental elements

The filmmaker is not the only person playing a version of herself. Her main cast are all non-professionals who worked collaboratively on the script, drawing on their own lives to create a collective autofiction. The documentary aspect helps to ground the more experimental elements so that the result, while arthouse in sensibility, remains accessible and is likely to particularly appeal to female audiences.

The director is certainly wearing her heart on her sleeve as her character says: “It’s easy to make good images, it’s more difficult to understand what you’re actually making a film about.” She’s not lying about those good images, and this sort of honest sentiment runs through At Night. In addition to B, the drama shines a light on the life of single mother Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), a friend B is trying to catch up with; Kátia (Kátia Belo Cardoso), who is caring for her mother; and a whole raft of women they encounter from different walks of life.

The other key presence is American poet Alice Notley, who recorded a reading of part of her epic poem The Descent of Alette before her death last year. It plays over one of the film’s many sinuous and beguiling sequences shot on the Paris metro. The feminist poem, about a woman travelling on a subway system who takes on the male tyrant forcing everyone below ground, is cited by Gibson as an inspiration for At Night.

Gibson’s film is, in many ways, suspended between performance and documentary. Additional poetic voices include Sophie Robinson and June Jordan, and there is a key cabaret scene involving the haunting vocals of musician Adam Christensen, who plays alongside Welsh musical artist Elvin Brandhi. Brandhi is also the composer of the impressive, melancholic score which picks up on the rhythms and sounds of the metro, expanding out in jazzy flourishes.

Balancing out these moments of overt performance are conversations centring on women’s experiences, from the way our approach to sex shifts as we age to gender identity and childbirth. The conversations also encompass observations on societal attitudes to ethnicity and class. These have a free ranging quality that means they are more questioning than categoric. While most of the encounters have a natural feel, one or two are slightly forced – most notably when B accidentally bumps into Didi in a convenience store where, conveniently, they become locked in.

Cinematography is by filmmaker Ben Rivers (Mare’s Nest, Bogancloch), who previously shot Gibson’s Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters and whose own work is often hybrid, is an ideal collaborator for the director. His sensitive 16mm camerawork focuses on faces and reactions, captures shopkeepers shutting up for the night or folk going about their business in a launderette. These overtly documentary segments are accompanied by the whirr and clicks of the camera, again drawing attention to the filmmaking mechanisms at work but also adding to its texture.