Night Always Comes 2025 Parents Guide

Night Always Comes is Rated R by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for language throughout, some sexual content, drug content and violence.

Movie Review – Night Always Comes (2025)

The world’s already circling the drain, and Night Always Comes is here to make sure you don’t forget it. Adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2021 novel, the film traps us in the one-day tailspin of a thirtysomething woman who just wants to pull off one simple deal buying a house. Sounds easy, right? Except nothing about this story is easy. Screenwriter Sarah Conradt tries to wrangle Vlautin’s mountain of misery into something coherent for director Benjamin Caron (Sharper), who, poor soul, has to make it all watchable despite the fact that every single frame is steeped in uncut depression. The film can’t quite decide if it’s a raw character study or a low-rent crime thriller, and when it tries to be both, the seams show. Still, there are flashes of genuine bite moments that capture, in all their ugly truth, the way modern life feels like a rigged game between the rich and the rest of us.

Our tour guide through this cheerful odyssey is Lynette (Vanessa Kirby), scraping by with odd jobs while caring for her older brother, Ken (Zack Gottsagan), who has Down syndrome. She needs $25,000 for a down payment on her childhood home money she obviously doesn’t have. Her credit’s shot, her prospects are worse, and her mother, Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), has just torched her own savings on a shiny new car. With 24 hours to conjure the impossible, Lynette goes into panic mode, rummaging through the ghosts of her past for a lifeline. She calls in old debts from Gloria (Julia Fox), an escort buddy, and instead finds a locked safe in Gloria’s sugar daddy’s apartment. Enter Cody (Stephen James), a bartender-slash-safecracker, because why not? The man might be able to pop it open and give Lynette a fighting chance if she’s willing to wade deep enough into Portland’s underbelly.

Lynette’s life is basically a highlight reel of bad breaks and worse decisions. Debt collectors treat her phone like a speed dial hobby. She’s Ken’s guardian because she yanked him out of long-term care that was more nightmare than nurturing, and she sure as hell can’t count on her mother for backup. When she thinks she’s finally got a shot at securing the loan, Doreen’s little car-buying spree vaporizes that hope on the spot. For a fleeting moment, Caron channels full-on Ken Loach territory, showing the crushing reality of people who get just close enough to stability to see it before it’s yanked away again.

From there, it’s a grim scavenger hunt. Lynette skips her shifts, zigzags through the city, and crashes into one depressing dead end after another. First stop: Rick (Randall Park), a regular who’s happy to pay for sex but not to float her a loan. So she steals his car. Logical next step? Team up with Cody to crack open the mysterious safe. One bad decision stacks on top of another until the night becomes less about saving her life and more about detonating it albeit with admirable focus.

Trouble is, the movie’s pacing can’t keep up with its own stakes. It stretches out the criminal misadventures until the tension thins, hitting a real low point with the arrival of Eli Roth as a germophobic gangster whose performance feels like it wandered in from an acting workshop and never left. Things pick up again when Michael Kelly shows up as Tommy, Lynette’s old pimp, injecting some actual menace and cracked humanity into the story. Because here’s the thing Night Always Comes works best when it’s about the emotional wreckage: the fear, the fury, the grinding hopelessness of living in a country where the deck isn’t just stacked against you it’s on fire. Every time it drifts toward bargain-bin crime drama territory, it undercuts the gut punch it’s capable of delivering.

Night Always Comes 2025 Parents Guide

Violence: There are hard hits literally blows to the head, someone gets run over, and at one point, a blade is held to someone’s throat. A glass weapon causes a deep, bloody wound, and we linger on broken glass and the pain it inflicts BBFC.

Language: We’re talking full-on “f-bombs” (“fk”, “motherfker”) alongside a string of “shit”, “asshole”, “bullshit”, and even passing religious interjections (“God”, “Jesus”, “Christ”, “damn”). If constant colorful language bothers you or your teens, brace yourselves.

Sexual Content & Nudity: There’s a brief but explicit sex scene mouths, moans, thrusting, panting. Plus, there’s nudity with visible breasts and buttocks. There’s also a distressing moment of sexual threat, plus references to someone being coerced into sex work as a minor which is downright disturbing. This stuff is dark, and it stays with you.

Drugs: You’ll catch a glimpse of someone smoking crack, a thread of drug dealing running through scenes, and the general sense that the drug world isn’t background noise it’s part of the backbone of Lynette’s downward spiral.

So, Should Your Teen (or You!) Watch It?

This movie isn’t for casual viewers or even casual teenagers. It’s a heavy, emotional trip through one woman’s worst 24 hours. If your teen is hitting the 17+ mark and they’re grounded in reality, this could raise some serious conversation. But if their emotional maturity is still growing or if you’d rather not walk into your living room feeling like you’ve been dunked in despair maybe have a screening first, or choose something lighter.

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