The Night 2020

Babak Naderi and Neda Naderi, an Iranian couple living in the United States with their one-year-old daughter Shabnam Naderi, are driving home after visiting friends. Their car’s navigation system suddenly malfunctions, sending them off course and leaving them lost for hours. Exhausted and anxious, they decide to spend the night at the Hotel Normandie, hoping a good night’s rest might straighten things out.

Outside the hotel, Babak almost comes to blows with a Displaced Man — a homeless elderly figure who seems to loom over the couple’s troubles — but the man vanishes as they step inside. Inside, the receptionist informs them that only one suite is available and that the hotel doors will be locked after dark, a detail that will prove crucial as the night deepens. The eerie sense of confinement begins to creep in, and the couple senses they are not alone.

As night settles, the stay grows increasingly unsettled. Neda is awakened by Shabnam, and a knock at the door is answered by nothing but a chilling quiet. A small child appears in the hallway, speaking to no one, and then vanishes as quickly as it appeared. Babak, awakened again by Shabnam, relies on the hotel staff to help with the routine of feeding a bottle, while the receptionist shares snippets about the strange tragedies he has witnessed here. Outside, Babak spots the [Displaced Man] again, along with the reflection of a strange woman standing beside him, a vision that unsettles him deeply.

When Babak turns back, Neda urges him to return to bed and promises to bring Shabnam upstairs. Yet later, he discovers Shabnam still on the ground floor, and Neda insists she was sleep. The apartment’s tension thickens as Babak encounters the mysterious woman again, only to be met with fear and confusion. A series of thumps and noises above them leads Babak to the roof, where he finds no one but a growing sense that someone is watching. He contacts the police, hoping for relief, but the officer who arrives is doubtful of their story, pressuring Babak to reveal what he’s not saying.

A knock on the door interrupts the uneasy silence, and the same officer is found standing there when Babak answers. With fear mounting, the couple decide to leave, yet Babak forgets the car keys and must return to the room. While waiting near the car, Neda is confronted again by the homeless man, who speaks in Persian and delivers a haunting line: > They hear the truth, morning comes. The moment presses on their nerves, and Babak reluctantly hands the keys to Neda from the room.

Neda waits with Shabnam by the car, when a child from the night pleads to play with his sister, echoing the earlier eerie encounters. Inside, Babak discovers a dead woman in the bathtub, a wedding ring lying on the floor, and hurries toward an elevator that momentarily jams with him inside. The woman from earlier asks if he remembers, and the power outage that follows deepens the sense of entrapment.

Babak calls his friend Farhad for help, but Farhad’s reply is blunt and chilling: “there is no way out.” Meanwhile, Neda’s terror escalates when the child confronts her with a painful question about secrets and a demand that she “say it.” Overcome with emotion, Neda confesses that she discovered she was pregnant five years earlier while Babak was away and chose to terminate the pregnancy rather than bring a child into a fractured family. The confession seems to trigger a shift in the hotel’s power: the lights return, casting a harsh truth on the room’s entrapment.

Babak attempts to exit again, but the doors remain stubbornly shut. Neda’s demand for Babak to reveal his own secret grows louder, pushing him to push deeper into the hotel’s labyrinth. In the midst of this tension, Babak is confronted by the woman again — revealed as Sophia — and the truth about his infidelity with her comes to light. The revelation spirals quickly into panic, culminating in Babak accidentally stabbing Neda in the abdomen as he struggles to find a way out and keep Shabnam safe.

The scene shifts to a hospital where a figure—Sophia’s body in the morgue—haunts Babak as he lashes out in a moment of desperation, stabbing his own arm at a tattoo before heading toward the exit that leads into a forest, searching for his daughter. He awakes with the hotel room’s clock nearby, realizing that he has traversed something of a purgatorial loop. The nightmare resolves when he finds Neda and Shabnam sleeping peacefully beside him, but the final image lingers: he glances at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, only to find it acting independently, turning its back to him and reproducing a painting seen earlier in the hotel. A single tear tracks down Babak’s cheek as the room’s quiet returns to him, leaving him with a haunting, unresolved truth about what has happened and what might come next.

The film blends suspenseful, supernatural undertones with a crucible of marital secrets, exposing how fear, guilt, and suppressed truths can bend reality inside a place that seems designed to trap and reveal. The performances, particularly the core trio of [Babak Naderi], [Neda Naderi], and [Shabnam Naderi], anchor a story that moves between intimate confrontation and broad, uncanny imagery, inviting viewers to question what is real and what is seeped from a past they cannot escape.