REVIEW: ‘At Night’ TIFF premiere depicts a poetic exploration of womanhood and the stories we carry

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ /5

This review contains mild spoilers for the film At Night.

A group of women move through Paris over the course of one night, sharing intimate conversations about motherhood, privilege, loneliness and the lives they wish they could lead.

In At Night, the debut feature from British filmmaker and artist Beatrice Gibson, six women from different backgrounds find their stories crossing as the city begins to close. Although Paris is filled with bright storefronts and neon lights, Gibson captures a noticeably darker and quieter side of the city.

Making its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), At Night is part narrative, part documentary and part dream-like state. Rather than following a traditional plot, the film moves through conversations, poetry, memories and brief encounters that gradually reveal the complicated realities of womanhood.

At the centre is B, played by Gibson, a filmmaker struggling to understand her latest project while attempting to reconnect with her increasingly distant friend Didi, played by Diocouda Diaoune. There is an aching loneliness around B. Even when surrounded by other people, she often seems to be searching for something she cannot name—a purpose, a connection or perhaps a way back to herself.

The women move through Paris as though drifting between one another’s inner worlds. Metro trains repeatedly carry the film from one story to the next, turning transit into more than a setting, almost like a transition. I like the way these scenes blend between the women’s stories, allowing one voice to fade as another comes forward. Poems are also read throughout, giving language to emotions the characters cannot always explain in ordinary conversation.

As the city shuts down, these women’s stories come alive.

Some of the film’s most powerful moments are also its most intimate. In one scene, B and Didi find themselves inside a convenience store when the power goes out. Enclosed by darkness, they have a tense conversation about privilege and the unequal weight of their struggles.

Didi calls B out for placing her comparatively smaller problems beside a life shaped by systemic loss. Their struggles, she makes clear, are not the same. She is tired of participating in a game where the same person always loses while someone else is positioned to win.

I loved that the film allowed this conversation to be uncomfortable instead of offering the characters an easy resolution. Their friendship does not erase the differences between their lives, and the scene makes space for Didi to say that clearly. The blackout strips away the distractions around them, leaving only what has long gone unsaid between two friends separated by race, class and circumstance. The exchange is uncomfortable, poignant and deeply relatable. 

Didi later speaks about living in social housing and the dispossession that has shaped her life. She wants more for herself and her daughter, but feels trapped by systems that make it difficult to imagine anything beyond survival. What hurts most is the suggestion that she put herself in this position—as if inequality can be reduced to a series of personal choices.

She wants the freedom to dream, but even dreaming has begun to feel like a privilege.

Elsewhere, the film turns toward fertility and the fear of a door slowly closing. The women speak about motherhood, sex, desire, age and the expectations placed on their bodies. I like the way the film connects these subjects without suggesting that every woman experiences them in the same way. Instead, they become overlapping questions about who gets to become a mother, who must provide care and what happens when the life someone imagined begins to disappear.

One woman who wasn’t named in the film describes losing her mother to what appears to be dementia. She is left caring for the person who was supposed to care for her, watching as her mother slips through her fingers. She describes the experience as feeling like an orphan, even though her mother is still physically present.

It is one of the film’s most devastating ideas: grief can begin way before someone is gone.

These stories carry great depth, although At Night only allows us to glimpse their surfaces. The film opens emotional doors without always walking through them, moving away just as a character’s life comes into focus. At times, that restraint leaves you wanting more. But it also feels true to the experience of meeting strangers at night, when someone may briefly reveal an entire world before disappearing back into the city and maybe never seeing them again.

Ben Rivers’ 16mm cinematography makes every moment feel dreamy and almost tactile. I loved that Paris is not presented as a polished postcard. Instead, it becomes a living, breathing place of train platforms, closing shops and eerily shadowed streets. Clips of an owl appear throughout, quietly watching over the night and reflecting the women themselves: awake while much of the city sleeps, moving through darkness and seeing what daylight conceals.

For all its melancholy, At Night is not without tenderness. The women challenge, comfort and recognize one another. Their experiences are not identical, and the film never suggests that womanhood creates an automatic equality between them. Instead, it finds solidarity in listening, in allowing different stories, inequalities and desires to occupy the same space without summarizing them into just one universal experience.

At Night feels less like a story being told and more like a collection of voices travelling beside one another. It is cinematic, vulnerable and quietly haunting, capturing the loneliness women carry as well as the connections that make that loneliness briefly easier to bear.

By morning, we don’t know everything about these women. We have only travelled with them for a few hours, catching pieces of their grief, longing and hope between metro stops. But perhaps that is the point. At Night invites us to pause and pause even more — maybe long enough to listen.