The Vigil

Viy-gil and
Sado Mazzik-ism

The Vigil
USA 2019
Directed by Keith Thomas
Vertigo Releasing

The Vigil is another one of those great feature debuts, this one by director Keith Thomas. It’s based around the Jewish faith and features a character who is less religious and no longer serious about that aspect of his life. That is to say, Yakov, the film’s main protagonist played by Dave Davis, is somewhat lapsed due to an incident in his recent past when he was unable to prevent the death of his little brother while he was in his care.

The film starts with flashbacks of another character in the second World War, where a young boy is forced by the Nazis to shoot one of his friends or family members, in a muted, blue dominated colour palette. We then meet young Yakov, who is attending a regular discussion group for, I think, Jewish people who have either stepped aside from their faith or had tragic events impact their lives... it’s never really made clear. Yakov is struggling to make ends meet and he makes the point that some weeks he has to choose between buying food and his medication (for a psychological condition which causes hallucinations and is probably related to his recent trauma, I would guess).

On his way out of his weekly meeting, he is approached by a deeply Religious member of the Jewish community who hires him, due to his past experience, to be a shomer for the night. A shomer is somebody who holds a vigil over a recently deceased person to stay up with him/her all night, recite prayers and generally protect the corpse from evil spirits. So he gets to the house of the dead gentleman, who was obviously the boy from World War Two at the start of the movie... and starts to watch over the body. The only other inhabitant in the house is the old man’s widow, Mrs. Litvak, played by Lynn Cohen. She goes upstairs to sleep and the guy who recruited Yakov tells her she suffers from senility (she doesn’t but, it’s easy to see why people think that because of elements of the story which become apparent) and that she’ll probably sleep through the night.

And then the story begins proper as Yakov is left alone with the corpse and, as you would expect, starts hearing and seeing things which lead to psychological attacks by The Mazzik. A demon spirit who has kept the reclusive Litvaks more or less confined to the house for decades and who now decides it wants the ‘broken man’ Yakov as his next permanent ‘haunt’. The attacks come in many forms and often incorporate modern technology like a cine projector or Yakov’s new smart phone... which gives the film a particularly creepy moment at a couple of points in the narrative. And, of course, it takes Yakov a while to realise that he’s not actually having his normal hallucinations and is, instead, experiencing a genuine, supernatural terror. The very kind of terror that he, as a shomer, should be concerned about. Things get even more serious when he finds he can’t leave the house and get more than half a block before cramping up completely and getting somewhat damaged... The Mazzik won’t let him.

And it’s really nicely put together, is genuinely unsettling in places (always good for a horror movie) and the story, such as it is, never really goes into the most expected territory I thought it would. The ending of the film, for example, took a completely different direction to where I assumed it would go.

The acting is great by the two leads (Yakov and Mrs. Litvak) as they find their place in the Mazzik narrative and the way the film is shot is wonderful. The house is lit by muted pastel colours which are a kind of off-brown orange for most of the rooms with the various dark areas pitched in a green hue which instantly gives a kind of neutral or unsafe feel to anyone when they are in those darker areas.

The director and cinematographer use this kind of juxtaposition of darks and colour to their full advantage here as well. It obviously pushes the depth visually but it also helps with the shot composition having this kind of two tone dominance to the rest of the colours. For instance, there are some lovely shots where we see the body from another room looking into it. So we have the dark greens of the walls coming in slightly to the left and right and the room behind with the corpse, in oranges but, because of the little projections of walls coming in from either side of the opening, it gives a kind of 4:3 aspect ratio pitched into the middle of the shot, which Yakov then sits in... facing camera, just slightly off centre. It’s a really simple but startling composition. 

And the director will similarly push the contrast of the rooms, often putting the camera at various junction points within the house so that you can see three or four areas of the house at the same time... so, for example, the front room on the left, the hallway on the right with the kitchen behind the hallway and the stairs leading up to the landing on the left. And, of course, with a horror film, that can be used to the director’s advantage by showing the audience things happening in one part of the screen, in a different room, which another character will be unaware of. So, yeah, there are a lot of shots where they kind of section off the space on screen to delineate different things they want to highlight.

The other big star of the movie is Michael Yezerski, who provides a truly great modern horror score (sadly unavailable as a proper CD release, so I guess I won’t get to hear it as a stand alone) which is absolutely stunning and really helps the tone of the movie. I first noticed it in an early conversation between two characters and it started building behind them, almost but not quite to the point where it felt either over scored or mixed in too much to the forefront. But, it never quite crosses the line and it’s not just a ‘modern horror atonal’ style score, although it does occasionally have elements of that. It genuinely comes in to signal things are about to get very spooky, for example, even when you’d have no clue that something was wrong just from the beautiful imagery. And although a fair amount of the scary atmosphere comes from the brilliant sound design as various noises come in and out of the soundtrack, the score is never overwhelmed by this as it might be in some films and it even takes an unconventional route, in one of the big scare scenes, where it gets really loud and becomes almost a ‘techno horror’ style track... almost like a modern ‘beats’ version of what Argento was trying to achieve with his Goblin scores but still anchored into punctuating the scares of the film rather than just playing through. It’s quite an achievement and I think this composer is definitely someone that some of the big companies, like Marvel, should maybe have a listen to. The score becomes an amazing, positive addition to this movie and I’m going to have to listen out for this guy’s name again.

And that’s me pretty much done with The Vigil. It’s not the scariest horror movie ever, obviously... but it’s genuinely got some great horror vibes, unsettling atmosphere and it definitely has its moments... a kind of Jewish ‘tooling up’ sequence had me smiling too. All in all, I think most horror enthusiasts will have a good time with this one and I definitely recommend it as one to watch.  It obviously shares elements of Viy (reviewed here) but more like a compressed version for a modern age and though the initial timidness of the central character shares some commonality with various iterations of the central protagonist in adaptations of Gogol’s Viy, he doesn’t bring any of this down on himself and it’s really not the same kind of story, mostly. Give this one a go.