Girl in the Night (2026)
Every so often a film comes along whose deadpan, melancholy rhythms remind me exactly why I fell for world cinema in the first place, and Girl in the Night is one of them. Luka Marčetić's Slovenian oddity is a bleak, bone-dry and quietly lovely thing, and it left me rather charmed. Three and a half stars.
Watching it, my mind kept drifting to the films of Aki Kaurismäki, and I mean that as high praise. It shares that same register of glum Eastern European melancholy shot through with the driest possible humour, of lonely people fumbling towards each other in a grey, unglamorous world. Marčetić has clearly absorbed that sensibility and made something of his own with it.
At its centre is Rok (Urban Kuntarič), who works the night shift at a petrol station and, to break the monotony, keeps himself amused by quietly pilfering chocolate bars from the shelves, a minor kleptomaniac drifting through the small hours. One night he meets a mysterious, diminutive young woman (Lara Wolf), her face badly bruised, who appears only after dark, talks of fighting crime and solving problems, and claims to have superpowers. Smitten and unsure how else to see her again, Rok hits on a suitably oddball plan: he steals her bike, and things unfold from there.
Around this runs a gloriously petty subplot in which Rok, sharing a house with a gay couple, tries to break them up by quietly informing the vegan of the pair that the other one has been eating meat, a small, mean, very funny piece of business that tells you everything about the film's sly comic sensibility. The humour throughout is bone-dry and deadpan, the kind that sneaks up on you rather than announcing itself.
The relationship between Rok and the girl is awkward, stilted and often painfully dry, and that is precisely its charm. Beneath the stiltedness there is a real ache, a longing for acceptance and connection that these two bruised, closed-off people can barely bring themselves to express. Marčetić never oversells it, trusting the silences and the discomfort to do the work, and it is genuinely moving for it.
It looks terrific, too. The cinematography is really impressive, turning streetlights, petrol-station strip-lighting and nocturnal Slovenian cityscapes into something cool, composed and faintly dreamlike. Three and a half stars. Girl in the Night is a wry, melancholy and beautifully shot little film about loneliness and the strange lengths we go to in search of connection, and if you have any affection for Kaurismäki's world of lovable deadpan misfits, I suspect you will take to it as warmly as I did.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country: Slovenia: Murina (2021)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Flies (2026), Please (2026)
