"There's something in the sky," says a character in "The Vast of Night," voicing one of the dustiest observations in cinematic science fiction. It's a line whose essence echoes down to us from such 1950s space-invader films as "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," "Kronos" and, of course, George Pal and Byron Haskin's epochal "The War of the Worlds." In the 60-some years since those low-budget movies created a new film genre, sci-fi pictures have become swollen with expensive digital effects and corroded with postmodern irony. Such movies can be wonderful in their own ways, but something elemental has been lost.

What's mostly missing from contemporary sci-fi films is a sense of simple wonder at the otherness of outer space and the inconceivable beings it might harbor. "The Vast of Night," an arresting first feature by self-taught Oklahoma director Andrew Patterson, restores the thrill of amazement people once felt at the thought of flying saucers and alien encounters and, in so doing, refreshes one of the most beloved film genres.

There's no showiness about the way Patterson pulls this off. His 90-minute picture is so minimalist that important parts of it play out inside your head. As the director and his gifted cinematographer, M.I. Littin-Menz, take us back to the 1950s and show us around the fictitious town of Cayuga, New Mexico, we quickly realize that they've brought us here to listen, not just look. The movie is fashioned like a radio play, held together by the everyday resonances of the human voice and the unhurried detail of the long-line dialogue (by first-time screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger). Patterson is so focused on the talk in this movie — some of which goes on at great length — that he occasionally lets the screen fade to black as the dialogue continues on under its own power.

The movie begins with a clever framing device: We see an old Philco TV set showing a program called "Paradox Theater" — a riff on the old Rod Serling fantasy series, "The Twilight Zone" (complete with a Serling-like narrator). Before long, the episode we're watching — it's called "The Vast of Night" — transitions from a blurry TV image into the movie itself. We see that the streets of Cayuga are dark and quiet; everyone is at the high school gym for a big basketball game. This leaves a former student named Everett (Jake Horowitz) to banter with a 16-year-old girl named Fay (Sierra McCormick), who needs help with the little battery-operated Westinghouse tape recorder she ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog and is now carrying around as if she knew what to do with it. Jake does know about tech: He's the overnight DJ at the town's little radio station, WOTW (note acronym).

The story really begins when Jake returns to the station and Fay takes up her position at the town's telephone switchboard, sitting in for her mom. Strange calls start coming in. One has a woman shouting through a blizzard of static that there's something hovering high in the sky over her property. Another conveys the news that there's some sort of police action happening on the outskirts of town. The most disturbing call brings nothing but an eerie sound — hard to describe but not unlike the noise that might be made by some unimaginable creature chewing on machinery.

Neither Fay nor Everett recognize this sound. But when Everett airs a tape of it on his show, a listener named Billy (Bruce Davis) calls in and has several things to say about it. (Billy is a plot conduit for the government-conspiracy paranoia that blossomed on the UFO circuit in the decades following the 1947 saucer-sighting incident in Roswell, New Mexico.) Billy's call is followed by one from an old woman named Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), who knows even more than Billy about the mystery sound and its otherworldly origin.

Director Patterson doesn't pretend he's doing anything new here: The story is familiar, and its conclusion is in little doubt. What he has added is a rich human atmosphere, with McCormick, Davis and Cronauer delivering long monologues in settings of hypnotic stillness. When they say there's something in the sky, you may find you still want to believe.

Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios.

Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.