{"id":897467,"date":"2026-09-16T04:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T04:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/897467\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T04:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T04:26:10","slug":"closing-night-review-sarah-paulson-and-naomi-watts-in-family-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/897467\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Closing Night’ Review: Sarah Paulson and Naomi Watts in Family Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIs actor-turned-director Cody Fern<\/a>\u2019s debut, Closing Night<\/a>, intended as a refraction of John Cassavetes\u2019 Opening Night, the 1977 Gena Rowlands vehicle about an actress grappling with a debilitating personal crisis? Seems likely, though that would be just one of several instances of the filmmaker\u2019s aim exceeding his reach. For at least half the movie\u2019s running time, the desired style appears to be the heightened melodrama of Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s tales of turbulent motherhood scarred by traumatic family secrets. But Fern lacks the firm grasp of tone to pull that off, or to smoothly navigate the eventual transition into anguish and sorrow.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other key influence \u2014 intentional or not \u2014 appears to be Ryan Murphy<\/a>, with whom Fern has worked frequently as an actor. There\u2019s a kinship in the arch tone, though sadly, none of the camp. Unless you count Sarah Paulson<\/a> as celebrated star of stage and screen Sandra Vale, played with a death-stare severity that might be appropriate for her sadistic psycho-nurse in Murphy\u2019s Ratched<\/a>. All of which is to say that no matter how accomplished the cast, the self-conscious movie only really starts half-working once it gets out of its own way.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tClosing Night\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA soft-impact lurch from archness to angst.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
Cast: Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, Dianne Wiest, Toby Wallace, Odessa A\u2019zion
Director: Cody Fern
Screenwriters: Cody Fern, Devon Bostick
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 55 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tSandra is in rehearsals for her Broadway return in Brecht\u2019s Mother Courage \u2014 and therein lies the first clue to her festering secret \u2014 but the seasoned pro is having uncharacteristic trouble remembering her lines and motivation. Nonetheless, she sends out formal invitations to her estranged family to attend the play\u2019s opening.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer jittery sister April (Naomi Watts<\/a>) bristles at being \u201csummoned\u201d to a reunion after three decades of silence. But she can\u2019t get there fast enough, concerned that her rudderless son Theo (Toby Wallace<\/a>), who\u2019s living in New York, should be kept away from his self-absorbed aunt. Before April can run interference, Theo drops a bombshell by revealing that he has already connected with the black-sheep diva. The scowling posters of Aunt Sandra all over town suggest that encounter was all but preordained.<\/p>\n

\n\tApril and Sandra\u2019s tart-tongued, boozing mother Diane (Dianne Wiest<\/a>, in brilliant form) takes a hard pass on the trip from their distant hometown, where she owns a shabby hair salon. But once April starts reporting back, the blowzy old woman \u2014 still pissed about Sandra sleeping with April\u2019s boyfriend when she was 15 \u2014 hops on a plane.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first big news to emerge is that Toby\u2019s girlfriend Lucy (Odessa A\u2019zion<\/a>, wasted in a nothing role) is pregnant, a fact discovered by April when she\u2019s snooping in their bathroom and finds a positive home pregnancy test. (She also randomly steals a hairbrush, the result of a klepto habit that doesn\u2019t add much.) Then when Sandra starts slurring and scrambling her lines before collapsing on the stage, she receives a shattering diagnosis, which helps move along the thaw between her and April \u2014 though not so much with crotchety Diane. The biggest secret, however, pertains to Theo and the reason Sandra distanced herself from the family all those years ago. If you can\u2019t guess what that is, seriously, wake up!<\/p>\n

\n\tThe script by Fern and fellow actor Devon Bostick takes a solemn turn in the final act, when Sandra resolves to take a drastic step and enlists April\u2019s support to go through with it. Those developments become lugubrious, though not without affecting moments. But the leap from the seriocomedy of the early action to the sadness and self-recrimination of the concluding stretch is not something the filmmakers negotiate gracefully.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s also hard to feel too much for the characters when only Theo, his emotions bounced about among the women, and Diane, who amusingly specifies while making her travel plans that she wants a hotel room with a minibar, seem like real people.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile it\u2019s always a pleasure to watch Paulson and Watts work, Fern forces them to work way too hard. (Certainly harder than they have to work on Murphy\u2019s risibly awful legal soap, All\u2019s Fair<\/a>, in which performance integrity seems irrelevant.) Sandra and April are characters who might almost have been more at home in some kind of chewy Southern Gothic that didn\u2019t have to rely so heavily on Diane to inject a bit of much-needed humor. That said, Watts does prompt a wicked smirk or two when April instantly appropriates Sandra\u2019s misfortune as her own.<\/p>\n

\n\tUltimately though, whether it\u2019s going for caustic dysfunctional family chaos or somber drama, any movie with this lineup of female talent ought to be a lot juicier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is actor-turned-director Cody Fern\u2019s debut, Closing Night, intended as a refraction of John Cassavetes\u2019 Opening Night, the 1977…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":897468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,310621,37662,310622,75,337,48309,142779,2125,106057,304983,310623,294539,2559],"class_list":["post-897467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-closing-night","tag-cody-fern","tag-dianne-wiest","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-naomi-watts","tag-odessa-au2019zion","tag-ryan-murphy","tag-sarah-paulson","tag-tiff-2026","tag-toby-wallace","tag-toronto-2026","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/897468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}