Bart (Tye Sheridan) is the night clerk at a nearby hotel working the 8pm-4am shift. He also has Aspergers and has wired up one of the hotel rooms in order to spy on the residents to help him copy their mannerisms and fit in better. But when he witnesses a guest being violently beaten he rushes to her room only to find her dead and become the key suspect in her murder. 

The Night Clerk is an intriguing prospect. Tye Sheridan has the opportunity to show his acting talent after the bombast of Ready Player One and it features a talented supporting cast. Helen Hunt plays his mother, Ana de Armas a guest that Bart gets close to and John Leguizamo the detective on his trail. Unfortunately aside from Sheridan and Armas’ performances the film never convinces as a thriller or a character study. 

Sheridan’s performance is interesting and made me think of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. His character struggles with eye contact and is unable to take visual or verbal queues as to what people mean and his answers are literal and awkward. The fact that his hobby is inherently creepy despite his admirable intentions makes it hard to feel sympathy for him completely. Ana de Armas character Andrea is the pivotal piece in the plot. The fact that it requires a massive amount of coincidence for her to meet and engage with Bart is frustrating, but her performance is perhaps the best in the film. Trying to understand what her character genuinely believes is one of the films greatest strengths. I have not seen Helen Hunt in a film for a long time and was excited to see her return to the main stream but I have to say I was so distracted by what I assume is plastic surgery that I could not concentrate on anything she did. Her entire face seemed frozen and devoid of wrinkles and movement. Her mother figure should have been interesting due to the way she enabled her sons behaviour but I am at a loss to say whether it was because of this distraction. John Leguizamo on the other hand just seemed bored to be there and had a script that essentially painted his detective to be incredibly slow on the uptake and ineffective. 

The actual murder and mystery as to who did it is incredibly simple to unravel. So much so I can only assume that the focus of writer/director Michael Cristofer was that of the behaviours and relationship between Bart and Andrea. But this is not enough to push the film into “must watch” territory.