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Seize the Night is a modest affair. How modest? A character points to the Hollywood sign but there’s no cut to a shot of the landmark (not even stock footage). Either the movie trusts we are all in one way or another familiar with the sign – and to be fair, who in the western hemisphere isn’t? – and know what it looks like, or for some reason can’t afford to show it.
Now note that I used the word “modest” when I could have easily, and perhaps rightly so, employed a more demeaning term such as “cheap”. I even deliberately avoided calling the movie “low-budget”, which it sure as hell is, and here’s the reason why: this is also a somewhat endearing affair – or at least has the potential to be so for the correct audience.
Seize the Night is a pitch-perfect emo adolescent fantasy that will appeal to anyone who ever went through a new wave phase and pined for a sexy goth babe, exquisitely embodied here by actress Nina Bergman. This is a small piece of wish fulfillment made expressly for those who at one time or another have found themselves, like Yeats’s lovelorn Aedh, in the thrall of La belle dame sans merci.
Befitting the post-punk Before Sunrise that it aspires to be, Seize the Night is driven more by dialogue than plot, but other than an esoteric reference to an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Robert Redford, the script falls quite flat. For instance, when the hero first meets the heroine the best he can think of to say is “You look like you could be in a Tim Burton movie.” This is exactly the kind of obvious pick-up line that she must have heard a million times already from every douche intent on bedding her, to the point that it should have the pavlovian effect of making her puke every time it comes within her hearing range.
But perhaps that’s part of the movie’s limited charm; the idea that you can be the dorkiest geek that ever existed and nevertheless be able to somehow gain, however briefly, the affection of a woman who is so out of your league it’s not even funny.