Home At Night
Directed by Allison Geller
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
After an online date takes a turn, a socially awkward loner finds himself pursuing a young woman down dark city streets.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise reads like a tired thriller until you realize it's deliberately inverting the predator/prey binary—a socially awkward guy becomes the pursuer, which means Geller's either mining something genuinely unsettling about male loneliness or she's interrogating who we actually root for, and either way it refuses to sit still.
Geller's command of nocturnal mise-en-scène and the formal tension between chase-film momentum and character study suggests a filmmaker thinking in frames—there's a lineage here from *Taxi Driver* through *Nightcrawler*, but the restraint in how she handles the pursuit itself is what distinguishes the craft.
The specific choice to keep the protagonist's internal life legible—to make his awkwardness the visual and emotional core rather than just a trait—is what transforms what could be a standard thriller premise into something that actually catches light on the small budget.