'Alan at Night' Delivers Creepy Found Footage Take on the Roommate Experience [CFF 2025 Review]

​At a certain point in life, most of us have had the “roommate experience”. That person who never does their dishes. Who plays loud music in the middle of the night. Or who unloads an entire can of Raid into the silverware drawer after seeing a cockroach but doesn’t bother to tell you…or wash said silverware (an actual thing that happened to me, but luckily, I found out before using the poisoned utensils). Everyone has their weird habits—yes, even you—and no matter how ordinary someone may seem, those habits tend to reveal themselves in some pretty disruptive ways once you’re living with another person. On the rare occasion, they can even be terrifying. With his energetic feature debut, Alan at Night, writer/director Jesse Swenson explores social dynamics and the terror of living with a stranger whose true colors come out once the sun sets.

Jay (Joseph Basquill), along with his best friend, Camillo (Jorge Felipe Guevara), runs Rad Apples Production, your average prank channel where the two film stunts like leaving what appears to be a used condom in the bathroom or eating an entire block of cheese. You know, real titillating, definitely not childish stuff. With Camillo having to move out and Jay one month from moving in with his girlfriend, Sam (Hadley Durkee), he puts out a call for a roommate to fill the rest of December. That call is answered by Alan (Chris Ash), a shy, Alabamian herpetologist who is about as straight arrow as they come…the opposite of Jay. What begins as awkward takes a dark turn though once Jay discovers that Alan has some strange nightly habits and decides to record the events for his channel.

​By this point, the horror genre has produced a heavy dose of Youtuber fare, perhaps most notably of late, Deadstream. All tend to operate around similar themes, often exploring the morality—or lack thereof—of “content creators” who subject others to either physical or emotional harm for clicks. Alan at Night follows the same old path, not all that interested in going much deeper than to say recording others without their knowledge is not okay. Despicable, even. The unintentional consequence of shows like Jackass that blew up in the early aughts is that every obnoxious kid with a camera now wants to be the next Johnny Knoxville. That’s all well and good—we all do dumb things when we’re young—but it crosses a line when Youtubers like Jay and Camillo exploit unwilling participants…especially in the case of hiding cameras around the apartment to film Alan. On one hand, these guys are just stupid kids, but their easy slip into exploiting Alan speaks to a much greater issue of how people lose their humanity once a camera is pointed at them. 

Alan’s odd habits begin with a snore that hardly sounds human and has cost Jay a few nights of sleep. This eventually leads to the Rad Apples team discovering that Alan’s eyes take on a strange hue while he’s dozing. Camillo decides to post their video of a slumbering Alan without his knowledge, and the two are down the moral rabbit hole. Soon, Alan displays other weird behaviors such as sleepwalking, eating jars of mayonnaise and, well, you’ll just have to see for yourself. Jay and Camillo film it all. Both Basquill and Guevara bring an infectious energy to the screen, their lighthearted humor almost making it seem as if what they’re doing is acceptable. Necessary, even. And that’s the scary part. Sure, Alan provides a good shock here and there, but more than anything, he’s a decent—albeit awkward—guy who clearly doesn’t have an easy time making friends. What is exaggerated here are just metaphorical horrors meant to represent much more common roommate habits that, while annoying, don’t justify the dehumanization of the person. What Alan is or isn’t doesn’t really matter in the end, because he’s ultimately a reflection of what Jay and Camillo have made him out to be…a guinea pig for their amusement.

Through fun animations depicting stories like Alan hunting for a certain reptile and the quirkiness of the main characters, Swenson disarms the audience by making us feel as if we are in on the joke. The same way that any content creator like Jay and Camillo exploiting someone else would. We laugh, and we’re fascinated by what Alan may or may not do next, so we go along for the ride. We accept it. We give it reason to exist. While perhaps not the intention, Alan at Night makes me think of the scores of kids who are a little off, recorded without their knowledge, embarrassing videos posted online for all to see. It’s cruel. It’s humiliating. And it points to something many of us don’t want to admit. That someone like Alan may be strange, or creepy, or off-putting, but it’s Jay and Camillo who are the true creeps for exploiting him. It’s us, the audience, who are the strange ones for giving real-life stunts like this our amused attention.

​Alan at Night is a horror comedy with a sci-fi bend that, for the most part, deals in tame scares and awkward humor, but it takes on a disturbing sense once you consider what we, the audience, are participating in. Though that’s nothing new to this sub-genre, Swenson’s debut nevertheless entertains with an effectively creepy take on an otherwise by the numbers premise.

By Matt Konopka