There’s something immediately glorious about a horror movie that takes a setting as inherently cursed as a remote roadside motel and asks, “What if the ghosts weren’t the problem?” Night Shift does exactly that. On the surface, it’s a familiar setup: new hire, empty halls, weird noises, moody lighting. But instead of just throwing jump scares at the walls like spaghetti, it takes its time, slowly peeling away reality until you’re not sure if you’re watching a haunting, a slasher, or an extended psychotic break with better lighting.
Gwen Taylor (Phoebe Tonkin) walks into the All Tucked Inn looking like she’s trying to outrun her past and her skincare routine at the same time. She’s nervous, guarded, clearly dealing with things that don’t come up in normal job interviews. Lamorne Morris’s Teddy, the laid-back motel owner, gives her the usual speech: the night shift is quiet, can feel long and lonely, blah blah. Translation: you will absolutely see something you cannot explain, and HR will not help you.
From the jump, the film leans into atmospheric weirdness over cheap thrills. Lights flicker, phones ring with whispering static, doors creak open on their own—classic haunted motel starter pack—but the movie smartly keeps everything just plausible enough that you can chalk it up to old wiring and nerves. Then teen runaway Alice (Madison Hu) shows up, insisting she’s seen people in the hallways who vanish, and suddenly it feels less like a job and more like Gwen wandered into the world’s saddest Silent Hill mod.
Tonkin is the glue holding all of this together. Her Gwen isn’t your standard scream queen or Final Girl™; she’s twitchy, brittle, and always looks a half-inch away from either crying or stabbing someone. When she opens up to Alice about Walton Grey, the supposedly escaped murderer who killed her family, you can feel the film sliding into a more intimate kind of horror. We’re not just in a spooky motel— we’re in Gwen’s head, and it’s got more locked rooms than the actual building.
The genius of Night Shift is that it lets the supernatural ambiguity marinate. Are we dealing with ghosts? A serial killer? Gwen’s unresolved trauma? All of the above? It doesn’t rush the answer. We get eerie visions, a figure by the pool, the sense that something is circling both Gwen and Alice like a shark that went to therapy once and decided it wasn’t for them. The ghostly sinkhole moment in the empty pool is especially great: it’s unsettling without feeling like a canned scare, a little visual thesis statement that says, “Look, there’s something deep and wrong here, and it’s going to get worse.”
And then the psychiatrist shows up.
This is where the film fully cashes in its chips. A middle-aged man arrives, looking suspiciously like the boogeyman Gwen described—Walton Grey, the family-killing monster she’s been haunted by for years. She does what every horror character should do but rarely does: she doesn’t wait to be attacked. She stalls, grabs a weapon, walks him to his room, and stabs him with scissors. Efficient! Cathartic! Also, as it turns out, catastrophically misguided.
His revelation—that he’s not Walton Grey but Gwen’s psychiatrist, and that Walton Grey is an anagram of Gwen Taylor—is exactly the kind of darkly absurd twist that shouldn’t work, but absolutely does. Yes, “Walton Grey / Gwen Taylor” is the sort of twist your high-school creative writing teacher would circle in red and sigh at, but in the context of this movie, it lands. It reframes everything we’ve seen: the visions, the paranoia, the ghostly figure, the motel itself. The monster Gwen’s been running from is literally just herself in a funhouse mirror.
From there, the movie stops flirting with horror and goes all in. Gwen doesn’t just accidentally kill one person in a panic; she goes full “facility breakout.” Two orderlies from the mental hospital show up, and she dispatches them with the same unnerving, workmanlike brutality. Alice, poor Alice, walks into this slaughterhouse mid-scene and becomes the one truly tragic figure in the film—the only person who really wanted connection and got an axe in the stomach for her trouble. By the time Gwen is hunting her through the motel, any lingering question about “is this all in her head?” dissolves into, “Oh no, it’s very real and she is not okay.”
What keeps this from becoming pure edge-lord misery is the tone. The film has a mean little sense of humor running under the bleakness. Not in quippy Marvel-dialogue ways, but in the dark irony of the setup: the “All Tucked Inn” is actually a loose, ramshackle hellmouth; the woman trying to turn her life around on the night shift is actually revisiting her greatest hits from the homicide reel; the “escaped killer” turns out to be the one person trying to treat her, and she thanks him by separating him from his tongue. It’s awful, but it’s also very knowingly awful.
Then we jump one year later, and the movie pulls its neatest trick. Gwen has “revitalized” the motel. New paint job, pool fixed, the All Tucked Inn now looks like an aggressively mid Airbnb with good reviews from people who die later. Enter Cole, a random college kid on a road trip, who stops for the night and admires the pool like he’s not standing directly on top of a metaphorical mass grave. Gwen appears, serene, composed, ready to check him in like she’s the assistant manager of the Bates Motel franchise.
And this is the final, nasty cherry on top: Gwen sees the ghosts. Her murdered family behind Cole, Alice at her side. They’re there, watching, silent witnesses to the fact that she is absolutely still broken and dangerous. She sees them, swallows it down, and smiles at her new guest. “Let me show you to your room.” It’s bleak. It’s funny, in the worst way. It’s the film’s way of saying, “Therapy didn’t work. Renovations didn’t work. The monster is still on the night shift. Sleep tight.”
Performance-wise, it’s a compact, effective ensemble. Tonkin gives Gwen the right mix of vulnerability and menace; you buy her as both victim and villain. Lamorne Morris takes what could have been a throwaway “nice boss” role and gives Teddy enough charm that his implied fate actually stings. Madison Hu’s Alice is a quietly heartbreaking presence: angry, lonely, desperate for someone to take her seriously, and then punished for trusting the wrong damaged adult.
Visually, the film punches above its weight. The motel is shot like its own character: long empty corridors, humming vending machines, sad fluorescent lighting doing its best impression of limbo. It leans into the cheapness of the setting in a way that makes everything feel grimy and vulnerable. This isn’t some gothic mansion with a tragic history; it’s the place you stop when you’re tired and broke and don’t want to drive another hour. That’s exactly the kind of place where evil feels plausible.
Is Night Shift perfect? No. Some of the early “is it a ghost?” beats are familiar, and the anagram twist will either delight you or make you roll your eyes so hard you see your own brain. But it’s bold enough to be weird, nasty enough to be satisfying, and smart enough to stick the landing with a final shot that feels like a punchline written in blood.
In the overcrowded field of “trauma, but make it horror,” Night Shift earns its spot by remembering that monsters are most interesting when they’re also people—and that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t the figure in the dark, but the smiling receptionist handing you your room key.
