TIFF 50: Natalia Reyes loses her identity in "It Would Be Night in Caracas"

by Cláudio Alves

In the past decade, Natalia Reyes has consolidated her reputation as one of Latin American cinema's most promising rising stars. Though Birds of Passage put her on the map for many a cinephile, her sojourn into Hollywood filmmaking probably earned her more recognition. Six years ago, the Colombian actress was one of the highlights of Terminator: Dark Fate, and just this year, she appeared alongside Kerry Washington in Shadow Force. Indeed, 2025 is something of a banner year for Reyes, who stars in two new projects making their way through the fall festival season. Mariana Rondón and Marité Ugás' It Would Be Night in Caracas and Tomás Corredor's Noviembre find their star amid moments of societal unrest – the 2017 Venezuelan protests and the 1985 Palace of Justice siege in Bogotá.

First up, the Caracas-set drama, which had its world premiere today at Venice before making its North American debut at TIFF…

From up above, the camera observes a protest filling the Caracas streets, reducing the crowd to an abstract mass. We plunge and cut, from a divine perspective to the human scale, protesters passing by while a woman stands in wait. She's Adelaida and her mother has just died in a country whose shortages made it near impossible to find any medicine that could assuage the pain as cancer ate away at her. As a hearse finally arrives to transport the body to its burial ground, its travel across the city paints a muralist picture of socioeconomic inequalities, chaos unbound. And when the world's on fire, grief is a luxury, mayhap an impossibility.

Adapted from Karina Sainz Borgo's La hija de la Española, It Would Be Night in Caracas regards the Venezuelan crisis from within, picturing its protagonist as a synecdoche of sorts, standing for an entire people who found themselves internally displaced, starving and struggling to survive, losing their identity along the way, and thoroughly traumatized by the ordeal. In Adelaida's case, this specific loss is especially true, literalized when, upon returning home, she finds her apartment sequestered by the Women's Supply and Production Front of the warring militia. Unmoored, she looks for refuge in a neighbor's abode, finding her old friend, Aurora, lying dead on the floor.

At her wits' end, she assumes the other woman's name, takes her diaries and documents. Perhaps then, she can escape this hell where death awaits at every corner. Past and present clash throughout, Malickian memories of mother-daughter bonds against the horror-adjacent pandemonium that is Caracas at night, the ghost of a dead fiancé and the flush of a new lover. More than functional drama, these contrasts prove a showcase for Rondón and Ugás' formal aptitudes, their talent for communicating the subjective experience that Adelaida and all those she represents have endured. As the title may imply, the night scenes deserve special mention.

Those nocturnal passages are a photographic dream, lit by Juan Pablo Ramírez in respect to the hour's pitch-black mystery while keeping the frame intelligible. More than anything, darkness seems to dilute the limits of realism and move the film towards something more oneiric. The glow coming from outside, swathes of bright amber and flame, transform the bourgeois domestic setting into something otherworldly, primal. Aural qualities are just as evident. The cacophony from off-screen sources is downright Bressonian in its evocative power. At the same time, frames within frames suggest the 1970s American classics in the paranoia thriller subgenre, when every corner feels full of enemies who'll tear you apart at any given chance.

Nevertheless, for all that praise, I can't say It Would Be Night in Caracas fully works for me. The root cause may be the whiff of reactionary rhetoric that arises when a film like this gestures at politics so intently yet refuses to articulate a cogent argument of its own, adhering to the individual's panic rather than a more collective perspective or purpose. Often, one feels that there is as much rage directed at the people's revolt as depicted in the film as at the authorities who brutalize the masses. Using footage from the real events doesn't help matters, and the character of Santiago, a student protester who was tortured in jail, only muddies the drama further. 

On that latter, character-driven front, there's a vagueness to Adelaida that makes her something of a ghost from the get-go, her transformation under current circumstances difficult to parse. We never know her before this untethered state, the flashbacks far too impressionistic to give a sense of who this woman used to be. Natalia Reyes tries her hardest to fill in the gaps, but it's to no avail. Indeed, Aurora in absentia often feels realer than the woman who hijacks her life. In its conception of a national tragedy, It Would be Night in Caracas posits Adelaida's journey as what happens when someone has nothing left to lose. Yet, because that arc remains so undefined, the conclusions produced from it can't help but ring hollow. 

At TIFF, It Would Be Night in Caracas will screen on September 9, 10, and 12, as part of the festival's Special Presentations.