ABSTRACT
In 2022, critics and scholars suggested that recent cinema had assumed a darker tone and that more films than usual were set predominantly or entirely in the night. The article explores the hypotheses that recent cinema has become “nocturnalized,” drawn to use night-time settings as a means of exploring a variety of social and political concerns. It focuses on three features of recent cinema: a stylistic engagement with the look of illuminated buildings at night; an increased use of single nights as the temporal frames for film narratives; and a construction of the night as the container of horrific events of a political or social character.
