‘Night Always Comes’ put me in mind of Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’: a single night in which everything unravels for the protagonist. Here, instead of Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett stumbling through surreal misadventures, we have Vanessa Kirby as Lynette, a desperate woman trying to hold together her fractured family. Burdened with a wayward mother and a disabled brother, she sets out to find $25,000 in the course of one night – money that will allow them to hang on to their crumbling house and fragile sense of stability.

The tragedy is that Lynette’s priorities are noble, but the methods she uses belong squarely to the world of film noir. Theft, prostitution, abuse, drugs, violence, and relentless lying tumble one after another in a descent that feels inevitable. This is a story of someone who crosses line after line, always with the conviction that she’s doing it for the right reasons, even as redemption slips further out of reach.

What makes the film striking is its precision. It gives us not just a portrait of people living on the margins but a tightly constructed night, complete with a ticking clock, where every choice carries escalating consequences. And then it steps back to pose the larger question: why do we push ourselves to such extremes? Is it to keep alive bonds that are already broken, or to sustain illusions of love and loyalty that can never be repaired?

Kirby’s performance embodies that paradox. She is manipulative, dishonest, and ruthless… but also principled, and driven by fierce resolve. She will stop at nothing, yet everything she does is in service of family. That moral tension keeps the film anchored in the best traditions of noir: an odyssey through an underworld lit only by neon and desperation, where each step brings the net closing in tighter.

In the end, ‘Night Always Comes’ is both tragedy and reckoning, a modern noir that shows how quickly the pursuit of survival can spiral into destruction.