Adapted from a short film of the same name, Colin Krawchuk’s The Jester follows estranged half-sisters Emma (Lelia Symington) and Jocelyn (Delaney White) who are stalked by a nefarious jester on Halloween night after their father’s supposed suicide. While the film is effective in its crisp, nostalgic Halloween atmosphere and offers fun kills and chilling imagery, The Jester loses its footing—and its creepiness—in its climax.
Krawchuk’s first feature film begins on an eerie, lonesome night, when John (Matt Servitto) attempts to call his daughter, Emma, whom he abandoned years before. Much to his despair, she’s displeased to hear from him and hangs up. A jester—clad in a neon-orange suit, top hat, and a gritty, sinister mask—appears and hangs John from a bridge without touching him.
Days later, Emma reluctantly joins her half-sister, Jocelyn (whom John had in a later marriage) at the cemetery to bury their father. Emma is bad-tempered and bitter, despite Jocelyn’s good-natured attempts at reconciliation.
Concurrently, the Jester who appeared before John begins to haunt the small town. This begins in an effectively chilling cemetery scene, where the Jester gleefully dances on John’s grave and ruthlessly slaughters two gravediggers.
The sisters part ways. Emma heatedly heads to the liquor store, while Jocelyn’s grating friends convince her to go to their town’s beloved Halloween festival. As the Jester stalks them both, reality increasingly begins to crumble, and bodies begin to pile up.
The Jester starts off as a strong, atmospheric horror flick with shots of its titular character lurking in leaf-ridden cemeteries and dark autumnal streets, but as it enters its final act, the film loses its identity.
Its underlying plot of Emma’s struggle for absolution—and, by extension, her internal anger and grief—clouds The Jester’s potential. The film goes too far into Emma’s inner turmoil and derails into disorienting, dramatic scenes of her younger self and Jocelyn with their father, and the Jester’s role is unclear here. Is he a moral-instilling ghost, or a chaos-loving demon?
In the first scene, it feels as though John had done something to summon or infuriate the ghoulish mime, or they had some kind of history. However, the Jester’s role in his death—and the Jester’s purpose in general—isn’t ever clarified, leading to a muddied final act that leaves more questions than answers. With a bit of rewriting, the film could’ve gotten back on track.
That being said, the Jester’s ability to torture, maim, and kill without touching his victims is a great concept that makes him distinct from other modern horror villains. The Jester’s malevolent miming is highly effective in building tension in this Halloween tale, notably in the liquor store scene (such as dancing with a panicking, headless cop) and a weirdly wholesome—but creepy—encounter with two young trick-or-treaters. And, of course, in the gory snatching of a main character’s teeth and eyes.
Additionally, the Jester’s appearance is a terror-inducing upgrade from his original concept in Krawchuk’s series of short films, with a remarkably evil mask to boot.
While Emma’s mournful subplot may have disoriented The Jester’s scares, Krawchuk still achieves an entertaining, nostalgia-infused Halloween ghost story that excels in its mood-setting, imagery, and creation of its titular character.
I look forward to seeing what Krawchuk does with his malignant mime in the future—I’ll be thinking of The Jester’s unsettling cemetery dance for a while.
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The Jester
2023
dir. Colin Krawchuk
80 min.
The Jester is now available digitally and on demand.
