Horowitz talks for a living on screen, and in The Vast of Night he does it with a 1950s radio cadence so exact you can hear the wireless he learned it from. We have seen him do one thing superbly and are waiting for the second.
Fi1m perspective
Everett Sloan arrives in The Vast of Night (2019) already talking. Glasses, slicked hair, a cigarette held the way a young man holds one after practising in a mirror, and a run of patter aimed at a switchboard girl who can keep up with it. Horowitz has the 1950s DJ cadence exactly, and we said so at the time: this is someone who has learned how to be a person from the wireless. What the film then does with him is let that assurance thin out over one night in Cayuga, New Mexico, as the cool he has borrowed from the radio runs into something the radio cannot explain.
He came up on stage before he came up on screen, Off-Broadway at fifteen in David Cromer's Our Town, and the theatre shows in the way he holds a long dialogue take without reaching for a pause. The scenes with Sierra McCormick are the best of it: two people talking fast and over each other, in unbroken stretches, with the rhythm of a double act that has been rehearsed until it sounds unrehearsed. Since then the work has mostly been supporting parts in horror, Castle Freak (2020), Agnes (2021), Shut In (2022), and a carnival worker in Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All (2022), none of which we have reviewed. Andrew Patterson, who directed The Vast of Night, brought him back as Remick in The Rivals of Amziah King (2025), a larger ensemble crime drama. Patterson is the only director so far to build a film around what Horowitz does, and he has now cast him twice.
The reservation is in our own review. McCormick is the centre of The Vast of Night, and the scene we remember is hers, at the board with the headset on and cords in both hands, listening to a sound that should not be on the line. Everett is the film's engine and Fay is its ear. We took to him within a minute, which is the job, and somewhere past the hour we noticed we had stopped hearing what he said and were hearing how he said it. That is a compliment to the voice and a small worry about the part.
He has talked his way through one film and done it well. What we would like next is a role that takes the microphone away and puts him in a room with other people, with nothing prepared. The horror films and the Patterson reunion put him in company rather than in a booth; we will judge them when we have seen them. Until then he is the DJ, and the DJ is good.
Biography
Jake Horowitz is an American actor. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from LaGuardia High School. He trained at CalArts and attended the Juilliard School.
Horowitz made his New York theatre debut Off Broadway in a production of Our Town directed by David Cromer. His film credits include The Vast of Night (2019) as Everett Sloan, Adam Bloom (2020), Castle Freak (2020), Agnes (2021), Bones and All (2022), Shut In (2022) and The Rivals of Amziah King (2025) as Remick. He has also appeared in the series Manifest (2018) and Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy (2025).
