28/03/2022 - London-based director Rafael Kapelinski delivers a moody but ultimately underwhelming film about lonely women and creepy men

Life in London can be a lonely affair, though you wouldn’t necessarily know this looking at most British cinema made in recent years. One of the best films to highlight this reality was no doubt Gerard Johnson’s 2009 effort Tony [+see also:
trailer
film profile], centred on a socially awkward and isolated serial killer very clearly inspired by Dennis Nilsen. The real-life murderer also hovers over Rafael Kapelinski’s A Woman at Night, which recently played at London’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival (running from 9 March-3 April). The film centres on Yiling Li (Jennifer Tao), a Chinese immigrant in London, who makes extra money on the side of her real-estate job by showing Nilsen’s flat to mysterious men (yes, they are all men) willing to pay her for this experience. More haunting than this situation itself, however, is the loneliness and alienation of everyone involved, Yiling included.

Kapelinski’s work on dead-space compositions, the shadows and darkness in Marcin Koszalka’s cinematography, and the muted performances from Tao and Lin Xinyao in the role of Yiling’s younger cousin, Yao Yao, expertly underline a sense of profound solitude and impossible communication. Early on in the film, Yiling takes up her new job in the real-estate office to work as a secretary – a real step up from her previous restaurant job – but soon faces rejection and embarrassment because of her co-workers. The man who employed her, himself also Chinese, proves less friendly than he first appeared, and the only time Yiling appears relaxed is in the small flat she shares with Yao Yao. Soon, she worries about how to pay the bills, however, and when she sees a colleague turn down yet another call from a man asking to visit Nilsen’s former flat, she quietly but quickly comes up with a money-making plan.

It’s an intriguing concept, and Yiling’s stone-faced pragmatism is in turns chilling and moving, a symptom of her economic despair and lack of resources. But the visits themselves, where Yiling, drawing inspiration from Jeanne Moreau’s look in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande À Part – a harmless cinematic flourish – meets up with a variety of strange men in the flat, are underwhelming. This does seem to be partly the point: later, when a horrified Yao Yao finds out about the scheme, Yiling tells her that these men are pathetic losers who would never have the guts to do what Nielsen did. They are just lonely men, and the often scary or disgusting monologues they deliver during their visits are just performances of a kind of masculinity they idolise but do not possess. Even so, staring into the void quickly gets tiresome. Though Yiling remains the film’s grounding presence, it is difficult to see how she connects in any way to this morbid fascination, beyond the rather trite idea that, as a vulnerable woman in a big city, she always has to keep an eye out for dangerous men.

The film then rather loses its way in trying to suggest that Yiling might have somehow fallen under the spell of this flat, and may be less innocent than she appears. The strong sense of atmosphere keeps things interesting, even as the dialogue and events become confusing, the pregnant pauses and contemplative long takes too drawn out for their own good. Kapelinski’s film is a suitably grimy and meditative reflection on the profound emptiness behind some lonely people’s fascination with serial killers and violence, but it’s one that rather gets lost in the darkness.

A Woman at Night was produced by the UK’s Paradox House.