At Night: an oneiric after-hours journey through Paris from artist Beatrice Gibson
The British artist’s first feature takes inspiration from the works of Kathy Acker and poet Alice Notley for a night of chance encounters.
- Reviewed from the 2026 BFI London Film Festival
Artist Beatrice Gibson’s first feature is a low-key odyssey through a city shuttering its doors for the night, while various underground spaces for expression and connection open up. It’s less inspired by a film like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) than the experimental novelist Kathy Acker (particularly her 1986 novel Don Quixote) and the late poet Alice Notley, the latter of whom is present in an audio-only role recorded not long before she died.
At Night is also lightly based on Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette (1992), from which Gibson draws some of her film’s structure. She transposes the poet’s New York subway of decades past to contemporary Paris, where the Metro acts as a portal of sorts to deeper levels of subconscious and oneiric states.
The writer/director recruits a network of non-professional actors (friends, artists and more) to play the multiple women that we follow navigating anxieties, enriching discussions and chance encounters across (what seems to be) a single night. Most play versions of themselves, including Gibson as ‘filmmaker B,’ scouting locations in the neighbourhood of a friend she’s trying to contact to no success.
B’s voicemail plays over some of the film’s exquisite opening sequence, which patiently follows a Paris Metro train. The visual textures and pacing of this scene (echoed in another bookend) recall recurring moments from Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), though here cinematographer Ben Rivers – a regular collaborator of Gibson’s on her shorts – shoots the film’s trains, tracks and platforms on 16mm. Elsewhere, the frequently gorgeous nighttime photography makes magic out of just barebones shopfronts.
Through the intimate, long-form conversations that alternately puncture or become intertwined with the more overtly stylised interludes, the characters explore social, political, structural and economic matters from a female perspective. Those reflecting on race, class, domesticity, labour and other topics include a poet processing her infertility and a woman grieving her late mother.
While what these women – sometimes paired, other times in larger groups – say to one another is compelling in itself, how they say it and listen is what captivates the most. Gibson’s distinctive aesthetic and tone make these probing conversations seem all too real, while simultaneously operating in a mode whereby the spaces occupied almost seem like dreamworlds, minus any ostentatious production design to even lightly hammer the point. It’s a compliment to say this is a film you could fall asleep to – its rhythms resemble that in-between state where bursts of inspiration send your mind racing while exhaustion lingers.