The Night Listener Critic Reviews

This unconventional psychological drama weaves a fascinating tale, and Collette and Williams give two of the summer's best performances.Read the full review

Williams delivers a solid, twinkle-free (though closed-off) performance, but the film as a whole can't decide what it wants to be.Read the full review

The Night Listener is by no means an example of perfect filmmaking, but it is the kind of movie that stays with you.Read the full review

Plays like an Alfred Hitchcock thriller but is nevertheless a movie of ideas. It bristles with intriguing thoughts about the realm of fiction, how one loves, issues of identity and questions concerning how one transfers a real-life incident into big-screen fiction. This is a film that can crawl inside your skin.Read the full review

The film has its creepy, suspenseful moments -- but it shrinks a rich, strange story to the dimensions of an anecdote.Read the full review

Aiming for unsettling atmosphere over character definition, the dawdling mystery thriller manages to flatten two protagonists that had far more depth in the novel.Read the full review

A movie with lots of heart but no heartbeat.Read the full review

What makes the film such a guilty pleasure is how Williams's righteous self-pity is perfectly matched to Collette's nuttiness and despair.Read the full review

Is The Night Listener a wintry drama with a few schlocky jolts, or an underdone psychological thriller straining for some dramatic heft on the side? Hard to tell, but either way, the movie doesn't cohere.Read the full review