The Sunlit Night (2019) is about art.  That is a deep subject and history has shown that it can mean almost anything.  After all, we are still asking ourselves the question, “What is art?”  Is it Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the painting most people will think of when the subject comes up?  Is it still placed in that category considering it is now half a millennium old?  What about rap music you hear on the radio?  What makes the answer tricky is that it depends on who you ask.  The other cliché attached to this is that beauty (though you could just as easily say art) is in the eye of the beholder.  Thankfully, the ultimate Beholder is God, and He sees beauty in all of us.  As a Catholic watching the cinematic arts, I am confronted with a conundrum connected to these ideas whenever I see nudity.  There is some sense to labeling much of it as smut.  I maintain that the overwhelming majority of those scenes are unnecessary.  That is the case with today’s film, though please do not assume that these moments are frequent in it.  And it is safe to say that sometimes it is for art’s sake, which is also true for this one.  Read on to see what I mean.

Art critics can be mean, and this is what Frances (Jenny Slate), a young artist struggling to find her way, has to deal with at the beginning of The Sunlit Night.  The panel of three universally pan her work, which is Jackson Pollock-esque.  It appears to be yet another setback for this daughter of two other artists.  Her dad, Levi (David Paymer), paints anatomy for magazines and journals, while her mom, Mirela (Jessica Hecht), produces prints for textiles.  She stills lives with them in their tiny New York City apartment with her younger sister, Gaby (Elise Kibler).  There had been some hope that Frances might start living with her boyfriend, but he breaks up with her as they are swimming, forcing her to board a bus home while still wet.  It gets no better for Frances upon returning to her parent’s flat.  She receives a text from her agent that her hoped for apprenticeship in Japan has been denied.  Then, as the family is sitting down for dinner, Gaby announces that she has gotten engaged to Scott Glenn (David Corenswet).  Because Levi is not keen on this man, he takes this opportunity to inform his children that he and Mirela are separating.  This leads to Frances sharing an even tinier studio with her father.  What this all adds up to is her accepting an apprenticeship with Nils (Fridtjov Såheim), a Norwegian artist she thought had died.  Still, as long as she is getting a change of scenery, she does not mind a summer in Oslo.  She is somewhat checked, but still determined to go, when she learns that it is to help him paint a barn in various shades of yellow on an island off the coast of the Scandinavian country closer to the Arctic Circle than is comfortable.  Nonetheless, she gets there trying to make the best of it, but finds Nils to be taciturn and uncommunicative.  Her accommodations are also less than spectacular, despite the amazing views.  While she has access to the bathroom in the main house, a converted fishery, her living quarters are a rustic (to be charitable) camper by the water.  Also, as the title suggests, the sun never quite sets this time of year in this part of the world.  Finally, there are the working conditions.  She expects to be able to do some of her own work, but he wants them to be at the barn from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm every day.  He has a deadline for this project to be inspected, and he intends to keep it.  Even so, she is able to find some time to do her own art, eventually asking the woman (Luise Nes) who stocks the dairy case at the nearest grocery store to be Frances’ subject.  In the meantime, she does a good job of dedicating herself to Nils’ hoped for masterpiece, so much so that he softens his attitude toward her with time, even inviting her into the main house for dinner.  While they are getting along better, he remains annoyed whenever she leaves the project, such as when she visits the nearby Viking museum and living history village.  It is there that she meets Haldor (Zach Galifianakis), who is the self-styled chief of the settlement even though he is from Cincinnati.  Frances is drawn there once more when she notices Yasha (Alex Sharp) entering the museum.  Coincidentally, she recognizes him as working in a bakery she knows in Brooklyn, so naturally she is wondering what he is doing in this remote place.  Apparently, it had been his late father’s request that he get a Viking funeral here.  Thus he, and later his mother, Olyana (Gillian Anderson), travel to the northern reaches of Ireland for the service.  Frances helps Yasha cope, and the comfort later becomes physically intimate when he visits her as she is finishing the barn.  In their post-coital embrace, Frances and Yasha lose track of time and are lying on the floor when Nils arrives with the evaluators.  Frances and Yasha leave embarrassed, and she assumes that she has ruined his work.  Indeed, they do not speak again, and it is Haldor and the grocery store clerk that drive her to the ferry.  Frances returns to the United States with the paintings she did of the clerk, which impresses the same three critics from the beginning.  Further, she gets a letter from Nils saying that the barn passed inspection.  Finally, she gets to see her parents reconcile at Gaby’s wedding in Levi’s characteristically backhanded manner.

It should be pointed out that the wedding is not the last scene in The Sunlit Night.  Such are the vagaries of syntax that I gave you the last three sentences in a different order than as presented in the movie.  At the same time, like art, what matters is how it moved you.  I am not sure the same can be said about the film as a whole, at least for some people.  As it is coming to a close and we see a montage of the events described in the last few sentences of my synopsis, Frances narrates a few questions of her own.  Did she run away from or towards her life?  Did she make the most of her opportunity or screw it up?  Did she get to where she needed to go?  These are things you can ask specifically while viewing a work of art, since they lead to the kinds of emotions an artist is trying to elicit from you.  Or you can apply them to your life more broadly.  In this last context, there is an interesting bit of advice given by the grocery store clerk as she notices Frances’ melancholy over what had happened with Nils in the barn.  The clerk says to remember who she is and screw the rest.  She puts it in more colorful language than this Catholic is willing to use, but the idea is one that we can look at from a Faith perspective.  Who we are is children of God, beloved by Him more than we can possibly imagine.  I like to think of this as a sort of baseline for existence.  The world can get us down, and the first part of the movie is evidence of this fact in looking at how it affects Frances.  At the same time, it is not accurate to say that she has some sort of religious experience.  Yet, she keeps going on her journey.  This is what God asks of us, to keep going and trust in Him.  We do not necessarily need to spend a summer painting in the upper reaches of Norway, or go skinny dipping in the North Atlantic.  Instead, notice him when and wherever you are and hold Him in your heart.  The rest should take care of itself.

If you are going to watch The Sunlit Night, take care to avoid the parts where there is nudity.  Again, I do not mean to suggest that it is all smut, but there is one sex scene in it.  The rest is about a person finding their way, which I think any of us can relate to on some level.  Thus, call this a mixed recommendation.