Night Moves can be a complicated, even confusing, mystery to piece together. “The plot can be understood, but not easily, and not on first viewing,” wrote Roger Ebert. This is by design. Just as private investigator Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) finds himself swept up and cast adrift by the very case he’s meant to be in control of — constantly revising, recontextualizing and second-guessing what he knows to be true — so is the audience.
A sense of feeling unmoored is crucial to Arthur Penn’s 1975 neo-noir thriller, in which there are no easy answers, only an atmosphere of suffocating despair. The bodies pile up, but more pervasive is the moral blight that infects each of the characters to varying degrees. Even a corpse is only given consideration in terms of the loot that can be plundered from it.
