The 2019 independent science-fiction film set in 1950s New Mexico, made for under $1 million, and centered on a mysterious radio signal is The Vast of Night.
Directed by Andrew Patterson, the film takes place in the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico, during a high-school basketball game. Teenage switchboard operator Fay Crocker and radio DJ Everett Sloan discover an unusual audio frequency and try to determine where it came from. Their investigation expands through callers, recordings, and a tense live broadcast.
The film was produced on an unusually small budget of about $700,000 and was shot in roughly three to four weeks. Patterson financed much of it with money earned from commercial and short-film production. Its period atmosphere comes from black-and-white imagery, television-style framing, long takes, and detailed attention to 1950s technology.
The movie is sometimes mistaken for a conventional alien-invasion film. It is more accurately a slow-burn science-fiction mystery: the signal and the testimonies surrounding it create uncertainty without explaining every event. Its inspirations include reported UFO and disappearance cases such as Kecksburg and Foss Lake.