GIRL IN THE NIGHT Review: How To Make A Superhero Movie Fun Again

Introduction 

The superhero genre has kind of been played out over the last few years. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) was a very good movie, but it still played with the formula we have come to expect from most Marvel films. I haven’t really seen a genuinely different take on the genre in a very long time. Girl in the Night felt new.

Made for a meager $114,000, Girl in the Night is not a deep film. However, it’s a fun one. I was more than a little surprised at how good a job writer and director Luka Marčetič did in terms of making this film work with such limited resources. Something is refreshing about watching a superhero movie that doesn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at every problem. Marčetič has to find other ways to make his world interesting, and for the most part he succeeds.

I also feel like Luka might have read Alias from Marvel Comics somewhere along the way. His female lead, played by Lara Wolf, does a phenomenal job as the Girl. To say that the Girl has a personality might actually be stretching things. She is sullen yet completely focused on patrolling her neighborhood and trying to help people. That is basically all the motivation we ever learn about her. She is a total cipher. Flat-line deliveries, almost no facial reactions, just this wonderfully stolid presence moving through the film. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.

Synopsis

The real story, though, focuses on Rok, played by Urban Kuntarič. Rok works at a gas station/convenience store, and it is a dull existence. The highlight of his workday seems to be his attempts to steal candy bars while the manager is distracted or sleeping. He lives with Kremen, a tailor who is just barely scraping by but seems perfectly happy with his life and his boyfriend, Nik. Rok isn’t miserable exactly. He is just bored. He wants something interesting to happen. Then one night he sees the Girl in action.

After hearing her story about protecting and helping people, Rok attempts to become her friend. She tells him that she can fly, yet primarily gets around on her beloved 1937 bicycle, which tells you quite a bit about the kind of superhero movie this is. Rok soon becomes her de facto sidekick. He also sets himself up as her nemesis.

That is where Girl in the Night finds its best idea. Rok realizes that his new superhero friend needs something to do, so he decides to provide it for her. Rather than waiting for some supervillain to appear, he essentially creates one. What follows is Rok’s increasingly elaborate attempt to give the Girl the purpose she seems to want while also giving himself something more interesting than stealing candy bars from work.

Discussion

There is something very funny about reducing the entire superhero formula down to this. There is no world-ending threat, complicated mythology, or massive origin story. We don’t really know why the Girl is the Girl. We don’t know why she can fly. The movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in telling us. She’s here, she wants to help people, and Rok thinks she needs an archenemy. That’s enough.

Their growing relationship is also surprisingly sweet, mainly because neither character seems capable of expressing much emotion. Rok isn’t quite as extreme as the Girl, but they are both remarkably deadpan. There aren’t big declarations of friendship or emotional speeches explaining what they mean to one another. You just know that they like each other. There’s something charming about watching that friendship develop almost entirely beneath the surface.

The small budget also becomes part of the movie’s personality rather than something Marcetic is constantly trying to hide. Much of the film takes place at night, and there are lots of very dark shots, but I never felt that the darkness took away from what I needed to see. The action is often blurred or partially obscured, then pauses periodically long enough for us to see the damage and chaos left behind. It is a good, cost-effective way of handling action when you don’t have the money for elaborate stunt work or visual effects.

There is literally only one major effects shot, near the end of the film, and even that is relatively simple. Marcetic understands what he can afford to put on the screen and, more importantly, what he doesn’t need to put there. A bicycle, a dark street and a couple of strange people can apparently be enough to make a superhero movie.

Conclusion

This may ultimately be what I enjoyed most about Girl in the Night. It doesn’t try to compete with Marvel or DC. It doesn’t try to convince us that its tiny story is secretly an epic one. It embraces being small, strange, and a little silly. I thought the film was shot amazingly well, and the characters remained interesting despite, or maybe because of, their almost complete lack of overt emotion.

I loved the secondary characters and the little world Marcetic creates around Rok and the Girl. This isn’t some major reinvention of the superhero movie, and it isn’t particularly deep. It is simply a fun movie with a clever idea that knows exactly what it is. I hope Girl in the Night finds an audience. And maybe we eventually get Girl in the Night 2, where somebody finally gives Rok a proper sidekick name.

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