The Vigil follows Yakov (Dave Davis), an ex-Hasidic Jewish man desperate for money, who agrees to serve as shomer, as a watcher over a deceased man’s body as part of Jewish funeral traditions. Confined within the dead man’s home, with only the dead man’s sleeping widow upstairs, another—more demonic—presence begins to make itself known over the course of the night. As Yakov confronts the horror of this demonic “mazzik,” his personal traumas are likewise pushed to the surface, along with those of the widow and her late husband.

Despite the seeming promise of its unique premise as a Jewish horror movie, The Vigil soon falls apart when it reaches toward more complex themes around grief and trauma. Initially, much of Yakov’s central crises are due to his leaving the Hasidic community. As the movie progresses, however, more and more details are compounded onto Yakov’s trauma history—surviving a hate crime, the death of a younger brother, mental illness—and then piled on top of all of that, the movie, clunkily and unsurprisingly, introduces intergenerational trauma and Holocaust trauma. It all becomes too unwieldy for writer-director Keith Thomas, whose script and filmmaking remains scattered and surface-level.

The way the movie handled (or didn’t handle) mental illness and trauma especially gave me pause, and perhaps could even be considered pernicious due to its seeming thoughtlessness. Yakov himself is suffering from some ill-defined trauma-induced psychosis; Mrs. Litvak (the dead man’s widow, played by Lynn Cohen) is mentioned as having Alzheimer’s disease; and both are dealing with various forms of trauma and grief. Yet the movie only uses mental illness as another bauble for telegraphing “horror” to the audience; it’s reduced to brief moments of Yakov swallowing pills, a blurry flashback, or a terse conversation with a worried doctor, as opposed to real and complex human conditions worthy of respect and engagement.

This inability or genuine avoidance at connecting more deeply with trauma, grief, or mental illness quite naturally imbues a potent lack of any emotional meaning throughout the movie. Davis and Cohen are admirable in what is essentially a two-person show, but they can only do so much to overcome a disconnect that stems directly from the screenplay and is further exacerbated by misguided filmmaking choices. The Vigil often relies on clichés or tropes to tell its story. Some scenes are directly reminiscent of The Exorcist, while others feel like vague riffs of Hereditary or The Babadook. But the filmmaking and the filmic references are hastily applied without consideration of context or meaning, so scenes come off as inert, while others are illegible. It doesn’t help that much of the movie is consistently shrouded in muddy coloring, blurred shadows, and convoluted blocking—monotonous recreations, scene by scene by scene.

Ultimately, the filmmaking is so disruptive as to affect the viewing experience, simply because the movie makes no functional sense more often than not. As an example, I kept asking myself (which is never a good sign for a movie), “Why doesn’t Yakov just leave the house?” The movie doesn’t even think the viewer needs an answer to this question until it’s well too late. We find out that he can’t leave … because the demon won’t let him leave. It’s an underwhelming answer, particularly since things have already escalated to the point where it’s nonsense that Yakov has not left the house (let alone tried to turn a light on). But instead of using the camera to show the viewer that Yakov physically cannot leave, so that the audience realizes at the same time as Yakov that he’s trapped in the horror, a character merely tells Yakov he can’t leave and then we follow Yakov as he goes outside and finds out that he’s physically trapped by the demon. It’s a breaking of a filmmaking fundamental (“show don’t tell”) without any clever or subversive intent, which means that it’s just bad filmmaking.

What makes my disappointment at what could have been an exciting new horror focus (I am DESPERATE for a non-golem Jewish horror movie) is that The Vigil could have easily gone in another direction, perhaps with a tighter script or a clearer vision from it’s writer-director. The first third is a great character study, and it also builds a decent amount of unsettling terror. It’s a thrilling first half hour, but it’s unfortunately lost amidst convolutions. What could have been a terrifying character study or a an earnestly cheesy fun night of horror is instead another tedious, shallow, and forgettable entry in the modern wave of “elevated horror.”

The Vigil
2020
dir. Keith Thomas
90 min.

Now available digitally and on demand

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