Gone in the Night(2022)

Plot Summary

• Kath (Winona Ryder) and Max (John Gallagher Jr.) are driving to a remote cabin in the woods at night. Kath is middle-aged while he's in his thirties. They arrive at the cabin and find it double-booked. Al (Owen Teagues) tries to get them to leave, but Greta (Breanne Tju) let them stay for the night. Brianne and Al both have matching green coats. (Important later.) They are both twenty-somethings. (Age in a big theme, figures in the end.)Inside the cabin, Max finds a game, Pillow Talk, a game that "reconnects lovers." They all play the game. At one point, the game asks Kath to recount how she and Max met. Kath is a horticulturist who runs a store and teaches an adult class. Max was a student in the class. At the end of the class, he asked Kath out. At another point in the game, Greta is to lick the elbow of the player to the right ("the elbow is an erogenous zone"), which is Max. She licks and bites Max's elbow. Kath is weirded out and turns in for the night.In the morning, Kath wakes up to find the cabin empty. She walks out into the woods and finds Al distraught. He said that Max and Greta hooked up and have run off.Back in the city, Kath tries to process what happened with a friend who suggests she finds out who Greta is. She is unsuccessful in finding Greta online, but a search of the address of the cabin reveals the ownership deed with a number. She calls the owner, Nicholas Barlow (Dermot Mulroney). Kath wants Greta's number so she can return a book to her. Nick won't give out the number but will drive to Kath's nursery store to pick up the book. At the store, Kath comes clean, and they have coffee. A passerby recognizes Nicholas in the shop and lays out who he is: a brilliant scientist who is now retired but was involved in a biotech startup. (The passerby mistakes Kath for a VC and pitches her on male cosmetics.) Later, Nicholas reveals that he left the startup because his father was wasting away and died from a genetic degenerative neuron disease. He left to be with him. Kath asks if he has the disease, and he says he is working on a treatment cure. Nicholas decides to help Kath.Flashback to a week earlier: Kath is hosting a dinner party for her Gen-X friends. Max is bored and trolls her friends. (One of her friends says songs on Spotify encode a cult message and Max says he was a victim.) He leaves to get more wine and runs into Al and Greta arguing in a liquor store.Cut to the present, Kath and Nicholas stake out Greta. Following Greta into a house party, Kath confronts Greta, who drops her smartphone with a screen-lock photo of her licking a sleeping Max's face. Kath leaves in disgust.Cut to the time when Max meets Greta and Al in the liquor store. Greta flirts with Max and invites him to a house party. There she flirts with him more and invites him to that cabin.Max returns two hours later. They argue, and Max blames Kath for being too old-fashioned and not spontaneous enough. He invites her to the cabin.Cut to Max and Kath driving to the cabin, but this time from Al and Greta's POV. They are expecting Max to be alone, and Al freaks out when he finds out he's not. In the morning, after Kath leaves, Al runs back to the cabin. Greta shows a drugged Max sleeping inside a plastic chemical barrel. She leans in to lick his face and takes a selfie. Before that, it is shown that Greta finds a letter in the cabin (important later).Kath and Nicholas are hitting it off. Nicholas says his cure is a transfusion treatment. Later, Kath drives to the cabin to give him a tiny avocado plant as a present. (He lives there and "rented" out the cabin.) He leaves to get wood to heat up water for tea and leaves a bundle of keys on the table. Kath riffs through his books and finds a photo of a younger Nicholas holding a baby. She turns the photo over, and it's a photo of Nicholas and Al! Al is his son. . Horrified, Kath grabs the keys and explores the cabin. She sees a shipping container in the woods. She walks to the container and unlocks it. Inside the containers are medical equipment and monitors, and Max is in a hospital bed hooked to a transfusion machine.In the woods, Nicholas meets Al and Greta, who are hiding out. (They were in the cabin when Kath arrived.) Deciding to confront Kath, they find her in the shipping container. Al and Greta are scientists (They were wearing the green lab coat to prepare to harvest Max that night.) Greta is the one who wants to use Max for harvesting, but she lets out a big secret: Nicholas is negative for having the degenerative neuron disease (the letter says negative test result), so Nicholas's motive for getting transfusion is to not age. Nicholas explains: he doesn't want to grow old and weak like his father and wants to spend more time with Al. He helps Kath out to keep tabs on her investigation but grew close to her. Hearing this, Kath plays to Nicholas's sympathy and says that she wants the transfusion too. She says she's dating Max to stay young, and every day of getting old scares her. That means Greta is to be harvested. Al and Nick subdue Greta with a sedative. But this is all a ruse as Kath tries to walk out with Max. A disoriented Max rips a tube out from his neck and promptly bleeds out. Kath runs out of the container and locks Al, Greta, and Nicholas inside. She sits in her car to collect herself and walks into the cabin, opens a window, and stares out. (thanks to themoviespoiler)

Storyline

• Upon arriving at a remote cabin in the redwoods, Kath and her boyfriend find a mysterious younger couple already there - the rental has apparently been double-booked. With nowhere else to go, they decide to share the cabin with these strangers until the next morning. When her boyfriend disappears with the young woman, Kath becomes obsessed with finding an explanation for their sudden breakup- but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined. Eager to rekindle their relationship, plant enthusiast Kath and her younger boyfriend Max go away for the weekend to a secluded cabin deep into the Redwoods. But there, a surprise in the shape of mysterious Al and Greta awaits. As Max and Kath reluctantly share the lodge for the night, unsettling pleasantries and feeble attempts to break the ice evolve into sheer awkwardness with a hint of jealousy, and right under everyone's noses, Max and Greta go missing. However, Kath needs to know. Have the two run off together after a sleepless night of wild fun? — Nick Riganas