The film continues Antonioni's technique of abandoning traditional storytelling in favor of visual composition, atmosphere, and mood.

La Notte is considered the central film of a trilogy beginning with L'Avventura (1960) and ending with L'Eclisse (1962).

Writer Giovanni Pontano and his wife Lidia visit their seriously ill friend Tommaso Garani, a left-wing cultural critic, at a hospital in Milan.

Giovanni stays behind and as he leaves Tommaso's room, a sick and uninhibited young woman seduces him and they kiss.

Lidia leaves and wanders the streets of Milan, ending up in the neighborhood where she and Giovanni lived as newlyweds.

As they flirt, she slides her compact across the floor, and soon others gather to watch the two compete at this game and place bets before Giovanni bows out.

When La Notte was first released in Italy in 1960, the Committee for the Theatrical Review of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities rated it as VM16: not suitable for children under 16.

[7] In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote: "As in L'Avventura, it is not the situation so much as it is the intimations of personal feelings, doubts and moods that are the substance of the film".

[8] Crowther praises Antonioni's ability to develop his drama "with a skill that is excitingly fertile, subtle and awesomely intuitive".

[8] Too sensitive and subtle for apt description are his pictorial fashionings of a social atmosphere, a rarefied intellectual climate, a psychologically stultifying milieu—and his haunting evocations within them of individual symbolisms and displays of mental and emotional aberrations.

There is, for instance, a sequence in which a sudden downpour turns a listless garden party into a riot of foolish revelry, exposing the lack of stimulation before nature takes a flagellating hand.

Or there's a shot of the crumpled wife leaning against a glass wall looking out into the rain that tells in a flash of all her ennui, desolation and despair.