David Dastmalchian

In Late Night with the Devil (2024), David Dastmalchian smiles before his eyes show any pleasure. As chat-show host Jack Delroy, he makes the effort of being charming visible without making the charm implausible. With his programme trailing its rivals, every new segment requires him to decide how much further he will go for the ratings. We can see him reconsidering, and that makes an increasingly outrageous broadcast believable.

The earlier parts tended to give him less time and stranger company. His feature debut was as the Joker’s henchman Thomas Schiff in The Dark Knight (2008), followed by work with Denis Villeneuve in Prisoners (2013) and, later, Dune (2021). As Kurt in Ant-Man (2015) and Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad (2021), he also established how useful an awkward presence could be in a superhero ensemble. The risk is that casting him becomes a quick way of telling us somebody is peculiar, with no further writing required.

Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman (2023) shows how much he can supply when the script gives him only a little. His Lester Billings arrives uninvited, hunched and apologetic, and the performance suggests a whole life before his arrival. Elsewhere the script gives speeches about grief; he does the work with his posture. In Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), he voices Veb, a blob fascinated by holes. We laughed at that fixation; most of the film’s more elaborate jokes left us cold.

Cameron and Colin Cairnes, who wrote, directed and edited Late Night with the Devil, keep almost everything on one set. That sustained attention suits Dastmalchian: we have time to watch Delroy make decisions instead of simply registering that someone unsettling has arrived. The film lets him down when it abandons the rules of its broadcast format, a disappointment after such a controlled first hour. Start there, but do not mistake the troubles of its last stretch for a limit on what its leading man can do.