Written by: Robert Benton & David Newman
Starring: Roy Scheider, Meryl Streep, Jessica Tandy, Josef Sommer, Sara Botsford
Rating: [2.5/5]
Following the murder of an individual, an investigation begins looking at all of the likely causes and who had a vested interest in seeing that person dead. Something quite difficult to nail down, which can lead to several dead ends until someone who matches every element of the description arrives as displayed in Still of the Night. Even with everything pointing in one direction, it does not necessarily make for a clean-cut case.
Struggling with the death of one of his patients by murder, Dr. Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) meets the alluring Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep), who had an affair with the recently deceased client. While not able to help the investigation much because of the confidentiality of the client’s information as his therapist, Sam develops a relationship with Brooke all while she becomes the prime suspect for the murder.
Getting to the bottom of who committed this murder certainly comes with many complications with more information getting revealed about the man who died. George Bynum (Josef Sommer) often engaged in clandestine extramarital affairs making him a prime target for a previous lover he has scorned. It allows a wide net to be thrown out there, especially when learning of the sheer volume of women he’s had affairs with. Messing with the emotions of people allows the opportunity for the love to shift to anger, which makes Brooke one of the prime suspects.
With this in mind, the film delves into this paranoid space for Sam Rice as he begins to fall for Brooke, but also suspects she played a hand in Bynum’s death. Considering Sam served as the therapist for Bynum, it presents the connection of him being a potential next target because of the knowledge he has about the recently deceased. This makes his connection with Brooke all the more dangerous if she happens to be the murderer at the center of this drama. This lack of clarity helps ratchet up the tension of this feature and the grueling reality that may transpire as we get towards the finale of the feature.
Helping along with the tension of the circumstance is the performance given by Meryl Streep in the role of Brooke. Streep helps craft this woman into such an alluring force in the feature to demonstrate just how easily Sam could find himself distracted by her beauty to possibly overlook the possibility of her being the murderer he wants to help uncover. Streep helps devise this mysteriousness around this character in her caginess in certain circumstances that sure make her look guilty of the crime because of the vibe she gives off. Whether or not she bears responsibility for what occurred, she does herself no favors in trying to come off as innocent. Streep stars opposite Roy Scheider who, as usual, does a good job of portraying a straight man as our guide through this very wild predicament. His blandness serves as a great complement to the work Streep needed to do as Brooke making for a strong collaboration.
Even with the positive elements this feature carries, it finds a difficult time trying to properly conclude the story, which just feels like it all goes out in a whimper. It certainly reveals the killer in question but does so in such an unintriguing manner. There needed to be the discovery of who committed this murder, which only had a few options of culpability but what this feature lands more than underwhelms, thus creating quite the deflating manner in which to conclude the film. It certainly does not represent the most obvious choice but one that certainly could have expanded the mystery other than quite a boring selection making the finale very anticlimactic as a result.
Having some good and bad elements in equal measure, Still of the Night sits right in the middle when it comes to the quality on display. It gives us a fun Meryl Streep performance in her portrayal of a seductive and mysterious woman, but it just did not have an interesting way to end the story making it quite the weak way to conclude something doing a decent job of building up the tension of the story. It leaves plenty to be desired in that regard while also having plenty that can certainly be appreciated as the feature unravels the mystery of this murder. You can almost imagine a better film providing a more ambiguous ending, but that was probably never in the cards, even if it should have been considered.
Films with Josh 
