Heart of Midnight seems to have begun with the intriguing original notion of redoing Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) as a psycho-sexual thriller. It is hardly any time before everything falls apart. The goings-on at The Midnight are incredibly murky. The script never seems to care about clear-cut narrative and by the end of the film, the supposed revelations of what is going on create more mystery than they clarify proceedings. There is no clear explanation of what Uncle Fletcher was doing to Carol and Sonny – presumably molesting them. It is not even clear whether Sonny, despite the name, is male or female. When Carol is chained up, orgiasts appear and grope her and then equally inexplicably disappear again without any explanation as to who they are. Nor is it made clear exactly who Peter Coyote’s character is and why Uncle Fletcher put him in jail. Everything that happens in the film has a haphazard feel about it.

Nor does director Matthew Chapman seem to care much about maintaining the pace. When the film descends into surrealism with giant eyeballs crashing about and see-through waterbeds with knives stabbing up from underneath, it becomes very strange indeed. The film is so bizarrely plotted that it makes more sense to perceive it on the level of dream surrealism than it does as linear narrative. Certainly, there are times when Matthew Chapman produces the occasional decent shock – the moment the apple that Jennifer Jason Leigh is offered in her dream suddenly turns up in her fridge, the appearance of the real Sharpe. The film tries to produce some interesting sets but the dreary and rundown abandoned building where it has been filmed keeps showing through.

Heart of Midnight was the last of four films that Matthew Chapman would direct. He did go onto script several other psycho-sexual thriller with Consenting Adults (1992) and Color of Night (1994), as well as other mainstream works such as What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001), The Runaway Jury (2003) and Black Water Transit (2009). Chapman did make a return to the director’s chair twenty-three years later with the faith-atheism psycho-thriller The Ledge (2011).
 

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