Small Hours of the Night Gives Testimony to Disembodied Dissidence

“If you could tie your being to the time of the stars, what would it be like?”

This question arrives late in Small Hours of the Night (2024), retroactively framing Daniel Hui’s historical chamber piece in cosmic terms. Yet the question stems from a decidedly grounded concern for the victims, nameless or otherwise, of Singapore’s stringent crackdown on dissidence. Beginning in the mid-20th century, Hui continues his investigation of his country’s tumultuous political history post-independence.

The film remains largely fixed in a single location: an interrogation room hosting a man (Kasban Irfan) and his prisoner Vicki (Yanxuan Vicki Yang). Their conversation begins with inquiries about another detainee who may or may not be real before Vicki remarks that she has visions of people, perhaps from the future. While the opening epitaph situates us in the late 1960s, the ensuing dialogue makes plenty of references to future events, the most significant involving the case of Tan Chay Wa, a suspected communist who fled to Malaysia but was extradited in the 1970s after being discovered with a weapon and eventually executed in 1983.

Tan’s name is never mentioned. Much of Small Hours of the Night ruminates on cataloguing forgotten or occluded names. The minimal chiaroscuro cinematography often disembodies its actors, leaving faces or hands suspended in darkness. The most successful aspect of this visual gambit is its emphasis on a clear delineation between speaker and listener. Irfan’s interrogator exclusively populates the first half of the film while Vicki’s voice is a spectral presence. When that dynamic is flipped at the halfway point, Hui ultimately privileges a polyphonic testimonial from the oppressed, issuing from a single actor.

Hui’s political delicacy to allegorise the past makes his stately stretches of stillness risk overdetermination. Yet in its momentary lulls, Small Hours of the Night occasionally vivifies the hauntological reverberations of silenced voices with humane sorrow.