Spoilers below.
These days, women everywhere are told that all they need to better their lives is a bit of manifestation and a romantic morning routine. Netflix’s Night Always Comes, however, offers something far more real: the story of a woman who’s already doing everything right and still can’t catch a break. Vanessa Kirby delivers a powerhouse performance as Lynette, a woman juggling two jobs plus escort work who finds herself with less than 24 hours to raise $25,000—or lose her family’s home.
Director Benjamin Caron doesn’t sugarcoat anything throughout the film. “The idea that you can work three jobs and not be able to afford your home is a uniquely modern tragedy,” he told Netflix’s Tudum, and that’s exactly what makes this film so necessary. Rather than show us women who can have it all, Night Always Comes forces us to confront the millions who are working themselves to the bone and still losing.
What’s refreshing about Lynette is that she’s not trying to climb any ladders or break any glass ceilings. She’s not looking for empowerment through entrepreneurship or finding herself through yoga retreats. She’s simply trying to keep her family housed, and the system is actively working against her. When her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) spends all of the money intended for their new house on a car, Lynette doesn’t have the luxury of cutting toxic people from her life or setting healthy boundaries. She has hours to fix everything, and that desperation drives every increasingly dangerous choice she makes.
Kirby, fresh from her Oscar-nominated turn in Pieces of a Woman and blockbuster role in Fantastic Four, brings a lived-in exhaustion to every scene she’s in. “She makes some bad choices, but not because she’s intending to,” the actor explained to Tudum. “She’s actually intending to only do something good.”
The film unfolds over one night in Portland, taking Lynette and her brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen) through an underworld she thought she’d escaped. From her dismissive escort client Scott (Randall Park) to her unreliable friend Gloria (Julia Fox), every interaction reinforces how alone Lynette really is. Even when she recruits Cody (Stephan James), an ex-con coworker, to help crack a safe containing $19,000 and a brick of cocaine, the partnership implodes when he rightfully calls out how she’s been using him.
The most harrowing sequence involves Lynette’s last resort: reaching out to Tommy (Michael Kelly), the former boyfriend who pushed her into sex work at 16. It shows how trauma echoes through our choices, and how desperation can drag us back to the very situations we’ve worked hardest to escape. When Tommy’s buyer tries to assault her, Lynette’s escape feels less like victory and more like another narrow miss in a lifetime of close calls.
Instead of a big confrontation or tearful reconciliation, Lynette chooses herself in the end. She says goodbye to Kenny, leaves cash for her mother and Gloria, and walks away. It’s not the ending that ties everything up with a bow, but it’s the ending that feels true. “Her greatest moral act is to finally choose herself,” Caron notes, and there’s something revolutionary about that in a culture that constantly demands women sacrifice everything for everyone else.
What makes the ending so powerful is its quiet subversion of typical movie logic. After everything—the theft, the violence, the near-assault—Lynette discovers her mother sabotaged the house purchase on purpose. Doreen never wanted to stay; she just let her daughter risk everything for a dream that was never shared.
The film doesn’t offer solutions or silver linings. Instead, it does something more valuable: it sees the women society renders invisible and depicts their stories without judgment.
