Night of Violence (2025) Review

At the offices of Robinek Pharmaceuticals, there’s a party going on to celebrate their defeat of a class action suit brought against them by a group of civilians concerning the adverse effects of their drug Azlepta. As cake is cut, the budget booze flows and office nerd Eliott (Kit Lang) attempts to get his crush Janelle (Abria Jackson) to notice him, a group of intruders has sneaked into the building. Each member of this masked bunch has a personal score to settle with Robinek and every employee is a target. Will anyone survive the slaughter?

The debut of director Illya Konstantin (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher Lang), Night of Violence opens with some grisly business about to be visited upon some unfortunate who’s being dragged from an elevator, before switching into unexpectedly zany mode as the increasingly unhinged commercial for Azlepta plays out, complete with unnerving list of potential side effects. From there, it’s straight to the party, where company politics and relationships are used to lay the groundwork in terms of which characters we’ll be rooting for and which ones we can’t wait to see get bumped off in gory fashion.

The first twenty minutes of The Office-style humour, albeit with more drugs and masturbation breaks, provides some amusingly awkward conversations between Eliott and Janelle, the former being cajoled into entering the dating arena by friend and colleague Rudy (Vince Benvenuto) who, in terms of likeability, is exactly halfway between our moral, decent, bumbling hero and the cesspit in a suit that is corporate lawyer Blake, played by Russ Russo with the shitbag dial turned up to eleven.

The humour may lean towards the purposely cringe inducing and there’s an amusing line about how certain sacrifices had to be made when testing the drugs that cured Alzheimer’s, cancer and baldness but the laughs suddenly dry up as the avenging force appears with a bound boss who promptly gets his throat slashed and gives the green light to a sequence of bloody mayhem as the party goers are drastically reduced in number, more often than not by repeated stabbings.

The switch from daft comedy to savage violence is jarring and the rest of the movie will find itself battling against this kind of shift back and forth in pitch, not entirely sure how far to push the one liners when the kills start to stack up on both sides as Robinek’s finest – well, mostly Blake, who’s coked up and really to slaughter – fights back against the people their organisation wronged. As much as the reaction of the Azlepta-affected people is disproportionate and that there’s a hint that everyone is in the wrong, who exactly deserves to survive?

From the beginning, it’s made clear that Eliott is completely unaware of Robinek’s legal shenanigans and this marks him out as someone who should survive the night, but does ignorance of your employer’s dodgy product and subsequent cover-up give you a pass against a group of townsfolk baying for blood? He’s shown to have morals and constantly clashes with Blake as to how they should make it until morning but at the same time he’s part of the Robinek machinery and only realises his second hand culpability in the wider scheme when he’s faced with potential death.

When the infiltrators are shown to be indiscriminately exterminating anyone who crosses their path and are arguably no better for using violence as the solution to their problems, sympathies do blur but I was left with the strange feeling that I wasn’t that bothered if anyone made it to the end credits which soured the fun I’d been having much earlier. By the final showdown, it’s just a question of whether Blake will get his comeuppance and if Eliott will grow a pair in order to save Janelle, leading to a closing mix of righteous justice and “aw, shucks” dialogue kiss-off which retains the tonal oddness of the project.

Konstantin’s film possesses all of the eager ambition of a first feature and Night of Violence tries hard to rise above its limited budget, but the action doesn’t always hit as hard as it should, the digital blood sprays don’t help and there are several lulls in the proceedings as the active players in this very bloody game become fewer, meaning that time has to be killed instead of bad guys. There’s a point around two-thirds of the way along where this treads water and I’d have been more than happy with this running a tighter seventy-four minutes as opposed to the current eighty-four.

When the humour and horror gel – such as a sequence in which a Eliott checks a stapler isn’t empty before using it to fix a wound – it works very well indeed but there are many more moments when either the horror is too dark to raise a chuckle or the comedic possibilities of a gruesome scrap prove just too bleak. The soundtrack also includes a few canny pastiches of artist such as Tiffany and Spandau Ballet as well as fun, Aerosmith-esque rock out. There’s talent behind this movie, unfortunately it just doesn’t all come together coherently in this one. Even so, it’s worth a watch to see the promise on display and wonder how Konstantin and crew might hone their skills next time out.

Movie Rating:

Night of Violence trailer