‘We thought with The Crown: “Is anyone going to watch this?”’ director Benjamin Caron on risk, realism – and royalty

A ‘safe pair of hands’ in high end TV, Caron now reunites with Vanessa Kirby for hyperactive Netflix thriller Night Always Comes about the terror of urban homelessness

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t’s quite a schlep from Buckingham Palace to the mean streets of working-class Portland, Oregon, but it is one that Midlands-born film-maker Benjamin Caron and actor Vanessa Kirby have undertaken with their new thriller Night Always Comes, adapted from the taut novel by Willy Vlautin. Caron and Kirby met nearly a decade ago when he directed episodes of The Crown, in which she played the young Princess Margaret from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Now Kirby stars as a former sex worker called Lynette, toiling in multiple jobs and living with her disabled brother (Zach Gottsagen) and their wrecked, wayward mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They have cobbled together the funds to buy their dilapidated house at a snip, only for Lynette’s mother to recklessly blow her half on a new car. Cue one manic night in which Lynette must make back the dough, by fair means or foul, or else be turfed out on to the streets.

Caron cites the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems and Good Time as an influence on his picture’s breakneck momentum. But, along with films such as Late Shift, On Falling and the forthcoming Urchin, Night Always Comes surely belongs to a wave of neo-realism that reflects our ongoing cost of living crisis. “The idea that you can work three jobs and still not be able to afford your own home is a universal modern tragedy,” says the affable 49-year-old director. “Lynette’s story represents millions of people who are just one or two pay-cheques away from collapse. Of course, the film is in the thriller genre but I also wanted to get across the idea that nurses or caregivers or whoever are being priced out of the very cities that they help to keep running.”