the vigil movie reviews

“The Vigil” is a modern Jewish-American horror movie, if only in the sense that it hints at personal problems—of familial and tribal guilt and responsibility—without ever transcending genre tropes that were established in “ The Exorcist .” I want to dismiss this sort of horror pastiche because “The Vigil” often feels like more of what recently came before it in “The Unborn” from 2009 and “ The Apparition ” in 2012. But what makes “The Vigil” so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis: shy guy Yakov ( Dave Davis ) starts seeing things after he, needing money, assumes the role of a “shomer,” or a “watchman” who’s paid to sit overnight with a dead body if the deceased has no available friends or loved ones, as an opening title explains.

Yakov’s so broke that he can’t even afford his antipsychotic medication, so the ghosts that visit him in “The Vigil” may or may not be all in his head. He sees them anyway, through the perilously under-lit gloom of the Boro Park house that once belonged to Rubin Litvak ( Ronald Cohen ), now dead. Rubin has a wife, by the way, and she’s even played by the great Lynn Cohen , but this is Yakov’s show. “The Vigil” is ostensibly about his struggle to maintain a personal connection with a religion that he broke ties with, under conditions that are only negligibly explained. But Yakov submits to these neurotic trials anyway, because “for thousands of years, religious Jews have practiced the ritual of ‘the vigil’,” as the movie’s solemn opening crawl tell us.

And yet: the most personal thing about “The Vigil” and its consideration of Yakov’s feelings is how murky everything is. He’s steeped in clichés about how secular Millennials see the world—they text and FaceTime with each other, sometimes in the dead of night!—and how that shapes their limited perspective.

Yakov is often quite literally in the dark, and his path is only sometimes illuminated by the words of older Jewish men like his therapist Dr. Marvin Kohlberg ( Fred Melamed ), who appears as a disembodied voice over the phone, and Rubin Litvak, who emerges as a silvery-grey blur on an old CRTV, rambling about demons and such. There’s also the pushy but maybe sincere Hasidic Rabbi Shulem ( Menashe Lustig ), the guy who got Yakov this white elephant of a gig; Shulem basically leaves the picture once he’s set everything up. Oh, and Mrs. Litvak, who warns Yakov that he should get out of her house, but then changes her mind, and says that it’s too late to get out because whatever’s inside will now follow him outside. So, I guess she counts, too.

Point being: Yakov’s the guy, and we see this later on when he inevitably arms himself with his tefillin , a protective link to the past (as described in Exodus) that he wraps around his forearm and forehead before delving deeper into the Litvaks’ home. A synthesizer score complements Yakov’s transformation and confirms his re-emergence as an avenging hero, like Jewish Rambo, only with a leather strap instead of a Bowie knife.

This sort of paint-by-numbers horror narrative barely scratches the surface of the heavy issues it alludes to, especially during the above-mentioned flashback, which suggests that Yakov doesn’t know how to synthesize his dual identity as a Jew and an American. Yakov presumably wants to get away from his past, but repression is, unto itself, only so interesting.

Parts of “The Vigil” hint at a deeper consideration of passing and self-loathing during early conversations with Shulem; I especially like that they only part ways once Shulem asks Yakov if he’s going to be ok, and Yakov throws the word “ok” back at Shulem like an unexpected bill … then Shulem sends it back with a shrug: “Ok!” Beyond that, there’s only a blank murkiness about the ol’ Litvak house, for reasons that are also rather vague. 

I imagine the sheer emptiness of “The Vigil” is deliberate, a sort of invitation for viewers to project their own problems onto Yakov, the empty sap. But for that to be true, you’d have to find something scary about Yakov’s haunted behavior. His limbs crack unnaturally and he sometimes buckles under the strain of an unseen presence, whose hands bulge out of the walls like the ones in “Repulsion,” and whose face is as featureless as a reflection. I didn’t see anything in the dead air of “The Vigil,” but maybe you’ll find something if you squint?

Now playing in select theaters and available on digital platforms.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

• Dave Davis as Yakov Ronen
• Lynn Cohen as Mrs. Litvak
• Menashe Lustig as Reb Shulem
• Malky Goldman as Sarah
• Fred Melamed as Dr. Kohlberg
• Nati Rabinowitz as Lane
• Moshe Lobel as Lazer
• Brett W. Bachman
• Keith Thomas
• Michael Yezerski

Cinematographer

• Zach Kuperstein

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The Vigil Reviews

Writer and director Keith Thomas knows how to keep us invested, and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein makes excellent use of the dark setting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 14, 2024

The [horror] mechanics employed throughout the movie become a bit repetitive and on-the-nose, making the audience a mere witness to an atonement. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2023

It seems there's been a curse on horror movies of recent decades, few productions are capable of ending at the same level in which they began. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 27, 2023

Albeit its uninspired ending, The Vigil is scary and vindicates the genre with honest resources and the weight of its story. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2023

The Vigil has an intriguing plot and insight into religious traditions that aren't always the subject of most horror films.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2022

A crafty theme-conscious horror film with an interesting cultural perspective and mostly good instincts when it comes keeping its audience squirming.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Production Designer Liz Toonkel does interesting work turning the suburban mundane into the creepy, aided by Michael Yezerski's deliberately provoking score.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 15, 2022

Like a great short story, The Vigil keeps the stakes low and the atmosphere high, creating a mood that elevates everything even when the plot goes a bit too far.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 10, 2022

Well-crafted and strong on the psychological elements -- thanks as much to Thomas' writing as Davis' portrayal -- this is a solid horror with some interesting subtext.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2021

To conjure claustrophobia, director Keith Thomas relies less on the haunted house setting and more on the inherent discomfort of being born inside a fringe group.

Full Review | Jul 9, 2021

Director/writer Keith Thomas creates a wonderful sense of dark, claustrophobic environment.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jun 17, 2021

Even if his execution of the concept can be banal in places, it's easy to forgive Thomas his cliches - The Vigil has brought something new and exciting.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2021

It's very creepy and very limited space... It's an effective movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2021

A quintessential low-budget supernatural horror, The Vigil mines Jewish folklore and rituals to create an effective sub-genre experience.

Full Review | May 1, 2021

Determining what is real or imagined is often a challenge in horror and filmmaker Keith Thomas is adroit at manipulating this.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 29, 2021

[Director] Keith Thomas does what he can to elicit some genuine scares and suspenseful moments with his clever use of camerawork, sound effects and dark environment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 5, 2021

The Vigil (written and directed by Keith Thomas) takes an effective 'less is more' approach by keeping the story simple while still delivering on some genuinely creepy scares.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2021

This is a really damn good horror film made on a tight budget with almost one location only, and it never drags. They find really exciting ways to use this location to their advantage.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Mar 30, 2021

The hook, the cultural aspect, the concept, the unsettling imagery and especially the acting elevate 'The Vigil' above being just another modestly budgeted haunted house movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 11, 2021

The most original, most chilling horror film of the new year.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 11, 2021

Review: Horror movie ‘The Vigil’ effectively explores grief and trauma through a Jewish lens

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Horror films often offer catharsis but rarely are they also as deeply sorrowful as Keith Thomas’ “The Vigil,” a horror film based in Jewish faith and culture. Dave Davis stars as Yakov, a young Brooklyn man struggling to establish a secular life, having left the orthodox community after a traumatic experience. One night leaving a support group meeting, he encounters someone from his old life, Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), who offers him a job spending the night as a shomer : a person who serves as a protective watchman over a dead body before it is taken to be buried.

The first red flag is the urgency of the request: The first shomer left unexpectedly in fear. But Yakov is in need of cash and has done this before. If the dead man’s wife, Mrs. Litvak ( Lynn Cohen ), is behaving a bit strangely (Shulem explains she has Alzheimer’s and her husband was a recluse), it’s only five hours and he can stick it out for the 400 bucks.

Initially, Yakov chalks up the spooky occurrences in the home, including his nightmares, the bumps in the night, the twitching shroud and a figure looming in the dark, to his faltering mental health, placing a call to his psychiatrist. But he can’t ignore the strange technological invasions within his newly acquired iPhone, or Mrs. Litvak’s troubling behavior and warnings. She describes to Yakov the mental torture that she attributes to an ancient demon, the Mazzik, that plagued her husband and drove their children away. “These memories,” she says, “they bite, and the biting never stops.”

“The Vigil” is Thomas’ directorial debut and the filmmaking is efficiently creepy, if a bit leading. The cameradirects your attention to every detail, lingering so long you feel you’re practically willing the sheet to move or the shadow to emerge from the darkness. It’s an effective way of placing us in Yakov’s position, questioning whether these things are actually happening or if our mind is playing tricks.

Michael Yezerski’s score is equally forceful, the ominous tones practically screaming, “something bad is about to happen here.” The score is a bit more effective when it swirls into more abstract electronic compositions, but Thomas’ approach to tone is unabashedly horrific, embracing the not-so-subtle elements of horror style that guide and shape our expectations and emotions. Thomas utilizes the genre to tell this story that uses Jewish lore and demonology to talk about memory, catharsis and trauma; Davis’ incredible performance brings a deeply sad and rueful element to the film.

“The Vigil” embraces Jewish culture not just in its settings and religious symbology, but in the way that memory and the processing of intergenerational trauma is a crucial part of Jewish existence especially after the Holocaust, while reckoning with anti-Semitism and hate crimes. It articulates that collective catharsis can alleviate those biting memories and past traumas in the present, allaying grief through personal atonement and forgiveness. Because those demons can be scary, but scarier still are our own regrets that go unrectified.

'The Vigil'

Rated: PG-13, for terror, some disturbing/violent images, thematic elements and brief strong language Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes Playing: Starts Feb. 26, Vineland Drive-in, City of Industry; Cinelounge Drive-in, Hollywood; and in general release where theaters are open; also on digital and VOD

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‘The Vigil’: The Dybbuk Stops Here

By David Fear

They are called s homers, folks who sit by a recently deceased family member or loved one, often in shifts, to watch over the body before burial. It’s a centuries-old Jewish tradition, designed to keep the soul of the dead safe from harm. Should a relative be unwilling or unable to perform this duty, it’s possible to pay a professional to sub in. It’s an honor and a calling, though there are some pitfalls in the shomer-for-hire business one needs to be aware of. The likelihood of extreme boredom is high for those who aren’t comfortable with silence, corpses, or a lack of company. The hours can be unusual. And there’s always the possibility that you may run into a spirit that, having been previously feeding off the anima of the person who’s just joined the choir invisible, may be looking for a fresh host.

An intriguing stab at modern Hasidic horror — we smell a burgeoning subgenre — The Vigil (in theaters and online starting February 26th) will feel like well-trod ground to anyone who’s seen a few supernatural thrillers; only the neighborhood has changed. Filmed among Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Borough Park, writer-director Keith Thomas’ debut stakes its claim in that spectral corner of cinema du scare via a specific set of cultural rules, superstitions, rituals, and mores. Although when we meet the man who’ll be our guide to this particular haunted house, he’s severed his ties to all of that. Yakov (Dave Davis) has left his Hasidic life behind and is trying to figure out how to navigate his new life. He has a support group, a mentor-cum-sponsor (Nati Rabinowitz), and the attentions of a young woman named Sarah (Malky Goldman). What Yakov needs is money.

So when a community elder (Menashe Lustig, star of the extraordinary character study Menashe ) ambushes him after a meeting and begs the young man to fill in for an AWOL shomer at the last minute, Yakov reluctantly accepts. Maybe it will be of comfort to you, the older reb suggests. Maybe you can reconnect to what you’ve forsaken. At the very least, it’s some quick cash. What neither men know is that the deceased comes with some baggage, including … something wicked that had attached itself to him decades ago after a tragedy. Given that Yakov himself suffered a serious trauma not that long ago, he may also be susceptible to this spiritual parasite. And if Michael Yezerski’s industrial-spooky score and Zach Kuperstein’s dark, forbidding cinematography somehow haven’t tipped you off that this is, in fact, a horror movie, the image of the two men walking up the steps to the late gent’s apartment, shot in perfect Exorcist silhouette , confirms that things are about to get terrifying.

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The shadow of William Friedkin’s Seventies blockbuster looms large over every film from the past 50 years that’s dabbled in possession narratives and tales of personal demons being used as fodder by real demons. But it’s especially influential here, even with the Judaic folklore subbing in for Christian ideology. Unlike Father Karras, Yakov has left a world governed by religious beliefs and age-old practices. Like The Exorcist ‘s white-collared knight, however, he has had a serious crisis of faith — if not in God, then certainly in a community that raised, nurtured, and possibly repressed him. A graduate of New York City’s Hebrew University College with a master’s in religious education, Thomas knows the world of which he depicts, and isn’t out to exploit Hasidism. He doesn’t seem that interested in exploring it much either, for that matter, which may be a blessing or a bit of a curse. Other than some criticism of the insular subculture’s conservative side via Yakov’s support group, there’s very little to suggest a deeper interest in or into this world past merely putting it onscreen. Which, given how little representation said world usually gets, could itself be construed as a stance. (If The Vigil doesn’t exactly double as a parable for cutting ties with orthodoxy, it does make the struggle literal — when Yakov tries to leave his post after things get nightmarish, he’s physically broken down and dragged right back to where he started.)

Yakov has also had a stay in a hospital that, it’s intimated, was preceded by a mental breakdown. Thus the lines are blurred as to whether little things like cadavers twitching under sheets, the dead man’s widow (played by the late, great Lynn Cohen) scurrying up a void of a staircase, the sound of a rotten toenail scraping against a linoleum floor, or a video clip texted to Yakov of him asleep on a chair in the same room he’s currently standing in are real or the product of a cracked mind. The dybbuk stops here regardless, and The Vigil is nothing if not determined to break out every trick in the malevolent-spirit-run-amuck book to spook, unsettle, and jar you. Unexplained noises, blaring soundtracks, sudden appearances (and disappearances), figures seemingly coming out of the walls, creepy-crawly bugs, basements with rickety 16mm projectors working of their own accord, a demonic mazzikin with heavy metaphorical significance: You can almost hear a checklist being ticked.

Thomas knows how to fill a frame and how to make something like the film’s final shot feel clever simply via a matter of focus. (The way he utilizes specific Jewish iconography for Yakov’s final standoff is a nice touch as well.) He also seems to rely heavily on a stock arsenal of scare tactics — as well as a message about letting go of guilt, pain, and the past — that can make you feel like you’ve seen/heard this ghost story before. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt in this case. It only makes you pine for its creator to follow a less predictable, less comfortable path.

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Common Sense Media Review

Supernatural horror has strong threat and language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Vigil is a horror movie with strong threat throughout and frightening supernatural occurrences. The story revolves around Yakov (Dave Davis), who takes a job as a shomer for a recently deceased member of the Hasidic Jewish community, watching over his body until burial. Death is…

Why Age 14+?

Repeated flashbacks include a character being forced to shoot another and a youn

Occasional use of language includes "a--hole," and derogatory terms such as "Jew

Character takes prescription pills.

Any Positive Content?

A central theme is the power of memories and the importance of working through p

Yakov is haunted by his past, but shows strength in character, especially when f

Violence & Scariness

Repeated flashbacks include a character being forced to shoot another and a young person being attacked and hit by a car. Death is mentioned frequently and a dead body is seen beneath a sheet. Characters fall down steps and are knocked unconscious, cut their hand on glass resulting in bloody cuts, and are set alight. Bones are seen to twist and crunch and something living is pulled from a character's mouth in body horror scenes. Strong threat is maintained for most of the movie, with flashes of demonic figures and ghostly apparitions seen. Reference is made to the Holocaust.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional use of language includes "a--hole," and derogatory terms such as "Jewboy" and "goy."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

A central theme is the power of memories and the importance of working through pain. Courage and empathy are also displayed.

Positive Role Models

Yakov is haunted by his past, but shows strength in character, especially when facing pressure to return to the Hasidic Jewish community. He is considered trustworthy by those around him and shows concern for both an elderly lady and the soul of her dead husband as he acts as shomer, watching over the body until dawn. Reference to Alzheimer's and mental health issues.

Parents need to know that The Vigil is a horror movie with strong threat throughout and frightening supernatural occurrences. The story revolves around Yakov (Dave Davis), who takes a job as a shomer for a recently deceased member of the Hasidic Jewish community, watching over his body until burial. Death is mentioned frequently and the covered body is in shot for much of the film. There are several disturbing instances of body horror -- such as when a living thing is pulled from someone's mouth -- and flashbacks where characters are injured and die. The Holocaust is referenced, and mention is made of Alzheimer's, and mental health issues with one character subsequently taking prescribed pills. Some language includes "a--hole" and discriminatory terms that may offend both the Jewish and non-Jewish community. Some lines are spoken in Yiddish and Hebrew, and are subtitled, although readings from scriptures are not. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In THE VIGIL, having recently left the Hasidic Jewish community, Yakov (Dave Davis) agrees to return to keep vigil over a body for the night in order to make some much-needed money. As strange occurrences begin to take place and disturbing memories flood his mind, Yakov must journey into his own past, and that of the recently deceased, to confront personal and collective demons.

Is It Any Good?

While Christian mysticism has been mined relentlessly in the horror genre, basing a movie so completely in Jewish superstition is relatively new territory. In his first feature film, The Vigil 's writer-director Keith Thomas creates an authentic setting for Davis' strong central performance to shine, maintaining a masterful naturalism while pushing the horror to just the right level.

The scares themselves are generic but well executed, all flickering lights and things that go bump in the night, with some more techno-horror thrown in for the FaceTime generation. The demon itself -- the dybbuk, with its backwards facing head and desire to feed off others' pain -- is used cleverly to represent the past and both Yakov's individual pain and the collective, historical trauma of the Jewish community. Its refusal to let Yakov leave the house drawing parallels to being unable to move on from the past or perhaps Yakov's own struggle to fully cut ties with his Hasidic roots. The stillness of the camera, tight framing, and moments of extended silence ramp up the tension, with the covered body looming in almost every shot as though biding its time. Well-crafted and strong on the psychological elements -- thanks as much to Thomas' writing as Davis' portrayal -- this is a solid horror with some interesting subtext.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the horror elements of The Vigil . Was the movie scary? Which scenes did you find most scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ?

Discuss some of the language used in the movie. Did it seem necessary or excessive? What did it contribute to the plot?

What role did the past play in the story? How was it shown to be important to the present?

What were some of the techniques used to create tension? Have you seen these used in other movies?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 26, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : February 26, 2021
• Cast : Dave Davis , Menashe Lustig , Malky Goldman
• Director : Keith Thomas
• Studio : IFC Midnight
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Courage , Empathy
• Run time : 89 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : terror, some disturbing/violent images, thematic elements and brief strong language
• Last updated : October 8, 2022

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Review: the vigil confidently roots its horror in jewish culture and mysticism.

Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.

Keith Thomas’s The Vigil has a premise so inherently creepy that it’s a wonder that it’s never been used as grist for the horror mill until now. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), a recent defector from the Hasidic Jewish community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is approached outside of a support group meeting for others like him by his former rabbi (Menashe Lustig), who asks him to serve as a “shomer” for the night. In accordance with Jewish tradition, he must watch over the body of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, Rubin Litvak, to protect his soul until his remains can be interred. Though reticent to return to the community from which he’s trying so hard to break free, Yakov needs the money, and so he agrees to spend the night at the Litvak house, sitting in the living room with Mr. Litvak’s corpse laid out on a table while his dementia-addled widow (Lynn Cohen) retires upstairs.

Seemingly taking a cue from André Øvredal’s similarly corpse-centric horror thriller The Autopsy of Jane Doe , Thomas’s confidently constructed debut hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth. In a particularly patient and assured long take, we watch as Yakov sits down at a table, his back to Mr. Litvak, and pops in earbuds to listen to music. Nothing exactly happens in this sequence, but Thomas’s shadowy, lamp-lit composition invites us to survey every single inch of frame—to spot the corpse in motion or, a perhaps, a ghost in the corner of the screen. And as you stare at this scene for what comes to feel like an eternity, you may even start to see things that aren’t really there.

Of course, plenty of spectral apparitions and things that go bump in the night do figure into The Vigil , which employs all sorts of tried-and-true methods to scare us, from morphing bodies to a toenail peeling out of the skin. But if the film’s big scares aren’t especially original, they’re nevertheless executed with care and precision, and Thomas manages to work in some distinctly Jewish Orthodox customs into the proceedings, such as a payot that’s pulled out of a character’s mouth and the tefillin, which is used as a kind of armor for spiritual combat in the film’s climactic confrontation between Yakov and a demon known as the Mazzik.

It’s this cultural specificity that gives the film its singular punch. With a few notable exceptions, such as Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s silent classic The Golem and Michael Mann’s The Keep , Jewish themes have remained largely unexplored in the annals of horror cinema. J. Hoberman, writing about Ole Bornedale’s Dybbuk-themed The Possession suggested that “the past hundred years of Jewish history have been sufficiently horrendous to preclude the possibility of a Jewish horror film,” but Thomas shows how that dark history can be elegantly incorporated into a relatively straightforward genre film without overwhelming it.

Like Marcin Wrona’s Demon , The Vigil links the evil spirit at its center to the Holocaust, to suggest the terrible weight of the past, but also to get at something even more insidious and unsettling: the Jews’ forced participation in anti-Semitic violence. If Thomas is a bit heavy-handed in expressing this theme through the prism of horror—at one point, Yakov faces the demon and finds that it has his own face—the film’s ambition and sensitivity around invoking real-world violence is impressive to behold. With The Vigil , Thomas hasn’t simply put a Jewish spin on a standard paranormal chiller story, but rather used the tools of the horror genre to express a sense of tragedy deeply rooted in his own cultural history.

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The Vigil Review

31 Jul 2020

Religious theology and iconography have long been fertile fodder for genre filmmakers, but stories have largely been rooted in Christianity (often Catholicism) or Paganism. Here, debut writer/director Keith Thomas draws on his Jewish heritage for this disturbing chiller which, although not delving too deeply into specific issues of faith and belief, makes the most of its intriguing set-up.

Yakov (an excellent, empathetic Dave Davis) is a young man adrift, struggling to make a new life in New York after leaving his Orthodox community following a tragic incident involving his younger brother. It’s not so much a crisis of faith as one of guilt and grief. In this fragile state he is persuaded to act as a shomer — someone who sits in vigil over a corpse through the night, to help the soul find peace.

Things are uneasy from the moment Yakov enters the claustrophobic home of the grieving Mrs Litvak (a phenomenal Lynn Cohen ), herself struggling with dementia yet displaying disquieting moments of lucidity. Shadows seem to move, ghastly noises emanate from upstairs. Yakov suffers traumatic flashbacks and fears he is losing his mind, until it becomes clear that he is, in fact, facing an ancient evil; a demon which attaches itself to the misery of others.

As Yakov is forced to face his fears, Thomas neatly blends the psychological trauma of his situation with genuinely creepy effects — a Sinister -esque basement video is a particular highlight — which ratchets up the tension to fever pitch. He is helped by some prowling cinematography from Zach Kuperstein, which catches movement on the edge of the frame and lingers on the pitch-black chasm at the top of the stairs, and a disorientating soundtrack by Michael Yezerski which blends traditional Jewish music with pulsing modern beats.

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Movies | 31 07 2020

The Vigil (Movie Review)

Luke's rating: ★ ★ ★ director: keith thomas | release date: 2021.

Steady, creeping dread is the order of the day in 2021. With Saint Maud finally making its long awaited appearance, The Night ’s spooky hotel vibe, and now The Vigil . Steeped in Jewish tradition and mythology, Keith Thomas’s directorial debut is draped in ominous imagery all while delivering an effective demonic horror yarn that’s not immune to tired genre cliches.

Set in or near Brooklyn’s Hasidic Borough Park, Yakov (Dave Davis), having recently left his Jewish Orthodox community and low on cash, reluctantly accepts an offer from his former rabbi to be a “shomer”—the Jewish practitioner who watches over the body of a deceased member of the community to protect their soul from malevolent spirits. Not long into the night, Yalov is beset by an evil presence that plays tricks on his mind and is seemingly intent on further poisoning his already shaken faith.

There’s an immediacy to The Vigil’s plot early on, as Yakov is recruited outside of a community meeting and immediately escorted to the home he’s meant to watch over until dawn. The walk and talk quickly fills the audience in on the pertinent details of what Yakov is walking into while also getting the bare minimum of character beats from Yakov himself.

However, The Vigil’s most enticing feature is the mounting dread that’s heavy out of the gate and once Yakov is left to his own devices with a veiled body consistently in the background...the ghostly and demonic vibes are thick and palpable. This is a testament to the mood derived from Thomas’s visual style. However, the shadowy corridors, ominous as they are, are so shrouded by darkness that the plethora of jump scares don’t always feel earned. Anything jumping out of pitch black darkness with ear shattering music and sound accompanying it is bound to make even a hardened genre nerd jump and send their heart racing. Nonetheless, a scare is a scare, and The Vigil is loaded with heart-jolting moments and unsettling visuals that once again benefit from Thomas’s delivery of the content both visually and in the sound design.

The Vigil is another film perfect for patient viewers who crave a hefty religious foundation in their horror. It’s going to lack the spooky momentum for genre buffs who like a little extra bang for their buck, but The Vigil has enough eerie chills and in-your-face jump scares to satisfy anyone looking for some empty jolts.

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Horror movies and beer - the only two viable options for entertainment in the wastelands of Nebraska as far as he's concerned. When he's not in the theater he's probably drinking away the sorrows of being a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan.

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There are tons of horror movies about Christian rites and rituals, but very few that explore Jewish religious traditions, let alone in a thoughtful and respectful way. Writer-director Keith Thomas takes on that challenge with his debut feature The Vigil , a relatively straightforward horror movie that feels creative and fresh thanks to its grounding in a specific faith tradition. The Vigil not only draws on Judaism in general, but also takes place within an insular Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, where the Orthodox community lives separated from the outside life of the city. Adding to that portrait of an isolated enclave within the city, most of The Vigil ’s dialogue is in Yiddish.

The Vigil opens not in Borough Park, but elsewhere in New York City, at a sort of support group for Jewish people who’ve left the secluded Orthodox community to join the wider world. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis) is still adjusting to secular life, struggling to find a job and pay his rent. He’s also suffering from unspecified mental health issues, having spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Yakov receives encouragement from his fellow Orthodox expatriates, all of whom have gone through the same adjustment period. He even garners the attention of Sarah (Malky Goldman), an attractive young woman who invites him for coffee and gives him her number. Yakov, who’s only just learned how to use a cell phone and is used to strict gender separation, Googles “how to talk to women.”

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Yakov can’t entirely escape the pull of his former community, though, and he’s susceptible to a plea from Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), a religious leader who corners Yakov after the meeting. Shulem offers the cash-strapped Yakov $400 to serve as a shomer, someone who sits shiva (the Jewish tradition of holding vigil over the recently deceased) when family members are unavailable or unable. So Yakov reluctantly agrees to return to Borough Park and spend five hours overnight with the body of a local Holocaust survivor who has just died.

It’s clear from the start that something isn’t right in this situation. Shulem tells Yakov that the previous shomer literally ran off, and when the two men arrive at the deceased’s home, his widow (Lynn Cohen) insists that they leave immediately. But Yakov needs the money, and Shulem assures him that old Mrs. Litvak is suffering from dementia and will simply sleep through the night. Yakov settles in to earn his fee inside this very creepy house with a dead body and an unstable old lady.

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What follow are a lot of standard horror-movie mysterious noises and lurking apparitions, but Thomas deploys them effectively, and  The Vigil has built up Yakov enough as a character that he’s worth caring about. There are periodic flashbacks to a traumatic moment in Yakov’s past that motivated both his exit from Borough Park and his mental breakdown, and Thomas reveals bits and pieces of the incident over time, building suspense but never cheating the audience. Likewise, the nature of the supernatural infestation in the Litvak house becomes clearer as the movie goes on, thanks to some cryptic words from Mrs. Litvak and a familiar-looking wall of clippings and photos in the basement.

Yakov also eventually watches a literal video explaining the threat he’s facing, but even this clichéd bit of exposition is handled in a creepy, understated way. Most of  The Vigil takes place within the confines of the house, and Thomas finds creative ways to use the same space with multiple approaches. A particularly unsettling moment toward the end of the movie involves Yakov simply walking down a hallway, as the walls bulge with ghouls and the passage seems to go on forever.

And while The Vigil never loses sight of its aim of scaring the audience, it never loses sight of its thematic concerns, either. Yakov’s trauma is directly tied to his struggle with his Jewish identity, and the demon itself could be representative of unhealthy ties that hold him (or anyone trying to leave a repressive environment) back from moving forward with his life. Davis gives the character a sense of vulnerability and determination that makes his personal journey about more than just defeating a nasty demon. Veteran character actor Cohen makes for a perfect mix of sinister and kindly as the elderly Mrs. Litvak.

The relatively small-scale production offers only brief glimpses of the demon itself, but it’s just enough to make the creature convincingly dangerous. The production design emphasizes the claustrophobic nature of the cramped Litvak house, and the cinematography keeps the images dim, even with the lights on, as if Yakov can never quite see his path forward. It’s all pretty familiar horror material, but Yakov is experiencing it from his own unique perspective, and in that way, the audience is, too.

Starring Dave Davis, Lynn Cohen, Malky Goldman and Menashe Lustig, The Vigil opens Friday, Feb. 26 in select theaters and on VOD.

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The Vigil | Film Review

Aaron B. Peterson February 25, 2021

Horror films today often fall into essentially the same three camps: vile contests for cheap jump scares amplified by grotesque special effects, societal observations amplified into horrific nightmares of everyday reality, and quiet tension burners that trust their audience to remain engaged while the story unfolds as a character engages their surroundings. The Vigil is writer-director Keith Thomas’ atmospheric take on the latter concept, and what a remarkable debut film it is.

Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis) is an unassuming young man with minimal social skills, a vague grasp on technology, and minimal prospects for financial viability. In order to make a little cash, and despite recently leaving his Jewish community, Dave agrees to provide services as a “shomer” for Mrs. Litvak (Lynn Cohen). A shomer is a person in the Jewish faith who sits over the corpse of someone until burial to protect the body of the deceased. Yakov soon learns that his ward, Mr. Litvak, was presumably tortured by a demon known as a mazzik for years, and now it is searching for a new host.

Dave Davis is the centerpiece to The Vigil; everything we witness (or think we do) is presented through the eyes of Yakov. Keith Thomas’ screenplay utilizes flashbacks to illuminate the audience on what facilitated Yakov’s departure from the Jewish faith, and Davis conveys the remainder of Yakov’s character work through mild mannerisms and ever-growing paranoia with an ease that allows us to become immediately immersed in the terrors at hand.

Adding to Davis’ layered performance is Lynn Cohen’s stellar turn as Mrs. Litvak. At any given moment, Cohen’s character could be suffering from grief, dementia, or be completely lucid. We never know, and it is this constant guessing that directly contributes to our own fears for Yakov’s situation, as the inability to know exactly where Mrs. Litvak stands at any giving moment is a prime component for how effective our own fears of the mazzik are.

The majority of what transpires in The Vigil occurs within the confining walls of Mrs. Litvak’s humble home. It is a tightly spaced location, and Thomas wisely makes the most of the elements while allowing time necessary for a scene to live and breathe.  At times, Thomas will fixate his camera on one static shot for just enough time that we worry we might’ve missed a vital clue, at other times his camera whips around corners akin to the early works of Sam Raimi (minus the blood splatter). Angles and shots are varied enough to retain our interest as we discover the truth of what is happening to Yakov, as well as keeping the audience deeply vested in “what’s going to happen next?”.

The Hollywood Outsider Review Score

Performances - 7.5, screenplay - 6.5, production - 7.

Keith Thomas delivers a remarkable debut in this taut, horrific thriller.

Tags Dave Davis keith thomas Malky Goldman Menashe Lustig and Lynn Cohen the vigil

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‘The Vigil’ review: An atmospheric and lingering horror experience

Keith thomas’s movie is available on bookmyshow stream..

A quintessential low-budget supernatural horror, The Vigil mines Jewish folklore and rituals to create an effective sub-genre experience.

Keith Thomas’s 90-minute film unfolds over one night and largely in a single location. Yakov (an expressive and intense Dave Davis) has been offered a well-paying job: to maintain a vigil for a deceased person until the last rites are performed. The task is usually performed by family members, but in the absence of any, an outsider is hired to fulfill the role.

Yakov is struggling financially and emotionally, and is working through a trauma that has shaken his Jewish faith. Desperate for money, he accepts the task to watch over Litvak’s body. Litvak’s wiry wife (Lynn Cohen) wanders around the house ominously declaring that things are not as they seem.

The five-hour shift is not going to be easy money after all. Yakov begins to see shadowy figures and learns of a demonic figure lurking in the house, waiting to feed off grief and trauma.

Jump scares, the oppressiveness of solitude and metaphors abound in this faith-based horror. The multilingual film questions the real and the imagined, grief and guilt, internal demons and the baggage of the past. Fusion music, moody lighting, visual effects, Davis’s performance and a slow tracking camera create a jittery, atmospheric and lingering horror experience.

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The Vigil movie review: Amazon scores one of the most underrated horror films in years, sleepless nights await

The vigil movie review: director keith thomas' debut feature is a genuinely well-crafted haunted house film, with a deeper core than you might expect..

One of the best Blumhouse features in years is also the most lowkey. The Vigil, a horror film stamped with a refreshingly unique cultural identity, arrives on Amazon Prime Video after a bafflingly ill-timed theatrical run earlier this year, followed by a pay-per-view debut some weeks later. Third time’s the charm.

The Vigil is basically a foreign language film, based on the Orthodox Jews in New York City. This is an even more insular story about the Jewish community than James Grey's Two Lovers, or the Safdies’ Uncut Gems . To conjure claustrophobia, director Keith Thomas relies less on the haunted house setting and more on the inherent discomfort of being born inside a fringe group.

Watch The Vigil trailer here

We meet our protagonist, Yakov, in a deftly directed opening scene that sets up his inner conflict, and also kicks the plot into motion. Yakov is somewhat of a lapsed Hasidic Jew — a tragic incident in his recent past, it is hinted, sparked a crisis of faith in him. Strapped for cash and barely able to summon the confidence to talk to a girl he has his eye on, Yakov accepts an emergency offer for a rather unsettling gig.

An old acquaintance basically guilt-trips him into accepting the job of a ‘shomer’ — someone who must ‘keep vigil’ over the body of a recently deceased person overnight, protecting it from evil spirits by occasionally reciting holy verses, but mostly, giving their departed souls company. Typically, a ‘shomer’ would be someone from the deceased’s own family, but we are told that Mr Litvak -- the dead guy -- was a bit of a loner. All he’s left behind is a house of horrors and a creepy old wife.

Almost immediately after Yakov arrives at the house, Mrs Litvak issues a chilling warning — leave before it is too late. Brushing her words aside as the ravings of a senile woman, he settles in for the nightlaylist at the ready, a woman to text, and a dead body right next to him. Things begin to get weird.

At first, the scare tactics are basic. Lights begin to flicker, stuff goes ‘creak’ and ‘crash’ in the dark, but Yakov soon realises that something isn’t right. Barely invested in the job, he tries to convince Mrs Litvak to leave with him, and wait for the others to arrive in the morning, as they’d promised. But she refuses. She tells him that she’s been marked by the Mazzik — a malevolent spirit from Jewish mythology — and that chances are, by now, he has too. The Mazzik targets only the ‘broken’, and terrorises them by taking a disturbing deep-dive into their already brittle psyches.

Not only is The Vigil one of the finest horror films in recent years, it is one of the few scary movies to explore Jewish culture, period. The last, if I recall correctly, was the fairly solid (but unimaginatively titled) Sam Raimi production, The Possession, inspired by the creepy urban myth of the haunted Dybbuk Box.

But while that film was a straight-up schlock-fest, The Vigil, in a surprising turn of events, turns out to be a potent drama about Jewish trauma — an inherited infliction that no one from the community, even fence-sitters like Yakov, can evade. Mr Litvak’s Holocaust past is revealed, and the film’s broad allegory about the passing on of generational pain begins to take shape. The Vigil works as a horror movie not only in the traditional sense, but like the best films in the genre, it evokes terror by invading your subconscious, and resisting the urge to bombard you with jump scares.

Also read: His House movie review: Netflix’s unsettling haunted house film unleashes real horrors

Christianity seemingly had this market cornered, but Keith Thomas’ debut feature, steeped as it is in a richly detailed milieu crammed with ancient rituals, is one for the ages. To overcome the horrors of the past, it says, one must first be willing to confront them. And to enjoy real horror films, one must first be willing to watch them.

Director - Keith Thomas

Cast - Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Fred Melamed, Lynn Cohen

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The author tweets @RohanNaahar

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'The Vigil' movie review: Surprisingly effective small-scare horror

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Director: Keith Thomas

Cast: Dave Davis, Lynn Cohen

Modern Hollywood horror films have one critical flaw: They are all somehow centred on Christian-themed horror and demons, often with unnervingly similar plots. This removes a certain sense of the invasion of personal space, even if the film turns out to be good at the end.

As a result of the monotony of modern horror, The Vigil , which uses Jewish themes and demons, appears as a breath of fresh air.

For a directorial debut, Keith Thomas has crafted an effective horror film, which succeeds at creating a personal connection between the haunted and the haunting entity, while cruising along remarkably smoothly for a film that is not even 2 hours long.

The Vigil follows Yakov Ronen, a Jew with depression and episodes of hallucinations, who is called upon to watch as a Shomer for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, Litvak. Not even 15 minutes into the film, The Vigil crafts a meticulous introduction for both the characters, of which one is not even alive.

As the night passes on, Yakov, who actually takes up the job reluctantly, learns that something might be haunting the house, despite his misgivings and apprehensions that he is hallucinating. Of course, nothing in a horror movie is that simple, and things quickly take a downward slope for Yakov as his past is slowly dragged out by the demon - a Mazzik - in its twisted attempts to torment him.

Yakov for his part is an oddball of a character. He's somewhat rational, unbelieving in demons and ghouls and the like till it's literally looking him in the face, yet he lacks the attention span - or perhaps the drive - to put 2 and 2 together, preferring to be driven by a mix of hormones and disinterest. This, ironically, makes him a likeable character as his story is revealed by way of confrontations with the Mazzik and the elderly Mrs Litvak, who herself appears cold at first, but grows into something of a motherly person as Yakov trembles under the weight of his past.

The Vigil relies greatly on jump scares and the use of blaring music, which do tend to mar some of the earlier mischiefs of the Mazzik, but around the halfway time, it really comes into its own class with a highly-effective use of third-person exposition from the deceased. From there, the film sees a series of a well-crafted mix of pure horror and disquiet, adding to the overall effectiveness of its gloomy and creepy atmosphere.

Not many horror movies can be effective when confined to the four walls and a basement of a small suburban house. It takes a somewhat more original approach to the use of mythology along with a tight focus on presentation and characters, something that The Vigil scores solid points for. One can only hope for future horror films take such an approach.

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A man providing overnight watch to a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community finds himself opposite a malevolent entity.

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Where does The Vigil rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

The Vigil is 6290 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 2533 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than The Alternate but less popular than Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song.

Streaming charts last updated: 9:24:10 PM, 08/31/2024

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The order twins jude law's hero & nicholas hoult's villain, and that opens up the movie's most important ideas.

We meet our main characters in opposing ways; the first steps of a spiral that will bring them ever closer in our minds. Our protagonist, FBI Agent Terry Husk ( Jude Law ), appears first as a man. He arrives in the Pacific Northwest, ostensibly for a bit of quiet, and immediately nudges his way toward investigating the Aryan Nations, the neo-nazi group with its primary compound just a few minutes drive away. We get to see, in subtle ways, his intelligence, and his recklessness.

Our antagonist is at first just a name: Bob. He's invoked with near-reverence in the opening scene, in which his power is witnessed without him even having to be there. When we do see Robert Matthews ( Nicholas Hoult ) in the flesh, he's perhaps not what we expected. He's composed and observant. He talks people into following him by speaking to them almost compassionately, dropping racial slurs into his speech with the same gentle tone. A sharp contrast to the scruffy, temperamental, often disagreeable Husk.

The Order is constantly drawing parallels, large and small, between these two, and between their organizations.

The lives of both men are defined by hate . Bob has adopted hate as his ethos and used it to build a community, albeit a destructive one. He has a family (an abundance of it, considering his pregnant mistress) and friends; he is trusted to lead. Husk, who spent his career fighting organized crime, has been consumed by his pursuit of the hateful. His family won't return his calls. He has one strained friendship with another Agent (Jurnee Smollett), and we gather from their conversations that he was once, but is no longer, in charge.

The Order is constantly drawing parallels, large and small, between these two , and between their organizations. There are also lines alluding to the fact that the government and police aren't always 'good guys,' something that made me notice the absence of justice in this film. There exists no pathway to make things right. When Husk abandons protocol to chase down his enemy, it doesn't feel like a heroic effort in service of the greater good, even though it may be. It feels like revenge.

In a movie this well-crafted, that can be no accident. The unrelentingly tense atmosphere, a product of script, direction, editing, and score working in unison, feeds into the nature of this world we've been dropped into. 'Good' has its representatives, most notably Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), the local cop who first sniffed out the threat. But what is truly good can't survive all this hate. Over time, we understand that he stands where Husk may once have been. We also understand that to become Husk would be, for him, a tragic fate.

While It Entertains, The Order Is Also Sending Us A Message

Two key scenes keep us on edge even after it ends.

In thinking of what this thriller accomplishes, and how it stands out from others like it, I am drawn to two moments. One is an image: Husk has taken to the wilderness with a hunting rifle, and is crouched down with a stag in his sights. Unbeknownst to him, Bob is just behind him, looking through his own scope at the FBI Agent on his trail. Though neither pull the trigger, the implication is clear. Hunter and prey aren't mutually exclusive; to be a hunter, in this world, is to be hunted .

Kurzel's film can be watched at face value, and anyone inclined to like this type of movie will enjoy it. But as it chugs along, it also shows us what hate can look like and what it can do.

The other is an exchange, partway through the film, between Husk and Bowen. In a moment familiar to the crime genre, the elder FBI agent opens up about a horrific happening from his past with the Italian-American mafia. He recounts that he turned a young nanny into an informant, that she died violently when she was discovered, and that he never caught the culprits. Bowen then asks why Husk is telling him this, but receives no answer.

The best true-crime movies perfectly blend reality with fiction, and these films are particularly effective at that.

Stories like the ones Husk tells are typically used to flesh out a haunted character (and give the actor playing them a nice monologue), but the script doesn't let us blindly accept this trope. We must ask ourselves, what purpose does this story serve? I consider it a warning about the scars that hatred leaves behind . Enter into a world of violence, regardless of which side of the law you're on, and what you experience could condemn you to a hateful existence.

Both moments work to deny us relief, something that is ultimately crucial to how The Order is designed, and to what it has to say. Kurzel's film can be watched at face value, and anyone inclined to like this type of movie will enjoy it. But as it chugs along, it also shows us what hate can look like and what it can do. Like Husk's story, it is a warning, and it leaves us with the chilling sense that the events depicted haven't, or maybe can't, come to an end.

The Order premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film is 114 minutes long and will be released in US theaters on December 6.

In 1983, a series of increasingly violent bank robberies, counterfeiting operations, and armored car heists frightens communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. As baffled law enforcement agents scrambled for answers, a lone FBI agent, stationed in the sleepy, picturesque town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, comes to believe the crimes are not the work of traditional, financially motivated criminals, but of a group of dangerous domestic terrorists, inspired by a radical, charismatic leader, plotting a devastating war against the federal government of the United States.

• A skillfully paced, thrilling crime story
• Compellingly explores hate and the lasting damage it causes
• Cast & crew all deliver quality work

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Venice Film Festival 2024 reviews: the best and worst films

From michael keaton in tim burton’s beetlejuice beetlejuice to angelina jolie as maria callas, our critic rounds up his favourite movies — and which to avoid.

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

T he famous Hollywood adage that MGM once contained “more stars than there are in heaven” has been widely co-opted this year by the Venice Film Festival. The expected arrival of Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Cate Blanchett, Daniel Craig, Lady Gaga, George Clooney, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (don’t sit that pair together!), to name but a few, have made this undoubtedly the starriest Venice in recent years, possibly ever.

Even better news, though, is that it’s also the sexiest! Yes, the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera has hailed the “return of eroticism” in this edition. He means films such as Babygirl , which features Kidman’s high-flying CEO caught up in a torrid affair with an office intern played by Harris Dickinson. Or there’s Queer , which stars Craig in an adaptation of William S Burroughs’s quasi-autobiographical novel about booze, narcotics and lashings of gay sex in mid-20th-century Mexico.

Elsewhere the festival’s status as a launchpad for awards season heavyweights continues apace with Jolie starring as Maria Callas in the biopic Maria , Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s first English language feature The Room Next Door , and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist , a near four-hour postwar epic about a Hungarian architect, Laszlo Toth. On top of that, there’s Clooney and Pitt in the crime caper Wolfs . And Phoenix reprising his Oscar-winning role as the demented incel warrior Joker, in Joker: Folie à Deux. Let the madness begin.

Maria — Angelina Jolie’s Netflix Callas is a pale imitation of an opera star

★★☆☆☆ Pablo Larraín’s biopic starring Angelina Jolie is close to parody at points. Punctuating a movie with Jolie in Maria Callas costume, in close-up, valiantly mouthing to camera the best bits of Tosca, Medea, La traviata and beyond, is problematic at best.

At worst it’s deeply distracting with shades of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This Callas has no significant co-star other than a clunky narrative device featuring Kodi Smit-McPhee as, sigh, an imaginary TV journalist filming a documentary called La Callas: The Last Days . Read our full Maria review

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Beetlejuice beetlejuice — burton and keaton return, but why.

★★☆☆☆ Yes, Beetlejuice was a (relatively modest) commercial hit in 1988, and yes it won an academy award for best make-up. But the film’s essential appeal came from creator Tim Burton’s art school irreverence, his cheap-looking sets, stop-frame animation and a ramshackle narrative held together only by gaffer tape and the energised performance of star Michael Keaton. It says something about that movie’s disposal pleasures that the standout moments were two lip-synced musical set pieces, to Harry Belafonte’s Day-O and Jump in the Line .

This new version has retained the lip-synced sequences, now to Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx and MacArthur Park sung by Richard Harris. The latter number, unleashed before a church altar during Halloween, is one of the few moments when the film fully ignites with strangeness and twisted grandeur. Elsewhere, alas, it’s mostly bland brand resurrection. In cinemas from September 6 Read our full Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review

Riefenstahl — a masterful documentary about Hitler’s favourite film-maker

★★★★☆ It is sobering and profoundly eerie to watch this masterful documentary about “Hitler’s favourite film-maker” Leni Riefenstahl in the festival that awarded her a gold medal for Triumph of the Will in 1935 and the top prize, then called the Coppa Mussolini, for Olympia in 1938.

The film, an epic meta-documentary that pulls together previous Riefenstahl analysis (including The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl from 1993) and newly unearthed archive material, is all about political evasion, self-preservation and the limits of denial.

As the end credits roll, and you stumble out on to the Lido, you can almost see her ghost floating by with a permanently fixed grin, and swearing openly that she knew nothing at all about what she euphemistically calls, in the film, “the gassings”.

• The best films of 2024 so far — the critics’ verdict

She also admits, however, that the first time she saw Hitler speak she was, “overcome with hot sweats and somehow captured, as if by a magnetic force”. The documentary, expertly orchestrated by German film-maker Andreas Veiel, is no giddy hatchet job either.

Instead, the director meticulously builds a portrait of a talented and ambitious opportunist who speaks eloquently about the search, in all art, for truth and beauty. Her tragedy, of course, is that she established a spectacular early career as a committed Nazi enthusiast and then spent the rest of her long, long life (she died aged 101), tying herself into knots of negation and deceit until she ultimately became a cipher for lies and ugliness. In cinemas later this year

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‘The Deliverance’ Review: The Power of Camp Compels Him

Lee Daniels directs Andra Day and Glenn Close in an exorcism tale that includes melodrama along with the scares.

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By Amy Nicholson

The director Lee Daniels frees his actors to exorcise their demons with audacious performances that rank among the most memorable of their careers. (If you’ve yet to see the mischief Nicole Kidman gets up to in “The Paperboy,” you’re in for a hoot.) With “The Deliverance,” a riotously wacky horror flick, Daniels adds actual demons, too, sending his latest troubled heroine, Andra Day, straight over the edge. Day, a Grammy-winning musician, earned a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for her performance in Daniels’s “ The United States vs. Billie Holiday .” Not only can she sing and act — here, she’s an outrageous scream queen.

Day plays Ebony, a single mother plagued by bills, alcohol addiction and her own violent temper. Her three glum children — Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Shante (Demi Singleton) — have endured years of abuse even before something wicked in their new home urges the tykes to hurt themselves and each other. Adding to the pressure, Ebony’s born-again, floozy mother, Alberta (Glenn Close), has moved in to recover from cancer (and criticize her daughter’s cooking), while a social worker named Cynthia (Mo’Nique) drops by to monitor the kids’ bruises, and, when pushed out the door, hurls as many nasty quips as she gets. When the spooky business starts, Ebony barely notices. She simply slams the basement door and keeps on trucking.

The script by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum is a riff on the 2011 case of Latoya Ammons, whose claims that evil spirits had overtaken her family were corroborated by a Department of Child Services case manager, a medic, a police captain and a priest. But “The Deliverance” is driven by Ebony’s struggle to convince anyone to believe her — the pitiless authorities refuse to look past her own flaws. To the audience, however, she deepens into a riveting character study, particularly in one close-up where Ebony agonizes over whether maintaining her truth is worth the terrible personal consequences.

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‘maria’ review: angelina jolie’s maria callas suffers at a chilly distance in pablo larraín’s biopic.

This chronicle of the final week in the life of the opera legend follows ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer’ in the Chilean director’s trilogy about famous women caught in the emotional headlights.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Doubling down on icons brings a lot of weight for a role to bear. It results less in a kinship between actor and character than a twofold remove — an exercise in character study, a tad glacial and distancing, rather than a flesh-and-blood portrait.

The movie is beautifully crafted, of course, graced with sumptuous visuals from the great Ed Lachman. The cinematographer captures the City of Light in 1977 in soft autumnal shades highly evocative of the period and shifts into black-and-white or grainy color stock for Callas’ many retreats into memory. Lachman, who was Oscar-nominated for his breathtaking chiaroscuro work on Larraín’s last feature, El Conde , shot Maria using a textured mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm, along with vintage lenses.

The DP’s outstanding work enhances the refined contributions of production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. The latter’s stunning gowns include chic ensembles worn at public occasions and exquisite costumes for Callas’ famed stage roles, some of which the singer is seen burning as she separates herself from the past.

“I’m in the mood for adulation,” Callas tells a Paris waiter when he suggests she might be more comfortable inside than at an outdoor café table. “I come to restaurants to be adored.”

The balance doesn’t seem quite right when you feel more for the loyal household staff who love and protect her than you do for the woman lying dead on the carpet by the grand piano. That image opens the movie, preceded only by a slow pan around Callas’ stately apartment.

Knight employs the pedestrian framing device of an interview, with a TV arts reporter and cameraman coming to Maria’s home. The journalist’s name, Mandrax ( Kodi Smit-McPhee in a thankless role), is a tipoff that he’s a product of Maria’s mind given that it’s also the name of the medication on which she’s most dependent — more commonly sold as Quaaludes in the U.S.

In what seems a ritual maintained for some time, Maria’s hyper-vigilant butler, Ferruccio ( Pierfrancesco Favino ), removes the pills from her dressing table and later from the handbags and coat pockets where she has stashed handfuls of them around the room. She has also stopped eating for days at a time, feeding meals prepared by her housekeeper Bruna ( Alba Rohrwacher ) to her poodles.

She becomes peevish about the dire warnings of her doctor (Vincent Macaigne) that her heart and liver are completely shot and that the stress of attempting to perform plus the meds she would need to get through it risk killing her.

Maria’s memories are additionally crowded with her triumphs in the world’s most prestigious opera houses — Covent Garden, The Met, La Scala — flooding the movie with glorious music. The naked emotionality and piercing tragedy of the immortal operatic heroines is a poignant fit for Callas’ end-of-life story and a useful counterpoint to her studied poise and aloofness in this interpretation. The power of work by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Donizetti, Catalani and Cherubini goes a long way toward delivering the pathos that often seems muted by Larraín’s approach.

Passages from some of the most celebrated classical operas effectively supplant the role of a score. The soul-stirring choice of musical bookends for the film starts with Desdemona’s supplicant prayer, “Ave Maria,” from Otello , and closes with “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca , in which a woman who lived for art and love feels abandoned by God. Opera enthusiasts will find much here to savor when the movie drops on Netflix at a date to be determined .

A number of striking moments use music to show memory and fantasy bleeding into Callas’ diminishing hold on reality. For instance, Maria strolling through the city with the Eiffel Tower in the background, in her mind marshaling a crowd of everyday Parisians singing the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore ; or a full orchestra on the steps of one of the French capital’s grand historic buildings, playing in the rain while a throng of costumed geishas perform the “Humming Chorus” from Madama Butterfly . That ineffably moving passage of music, representing Butterfly’s calm vigil as she waits for Pinkerton’s return, adds emotional heft to the tragedy looming in Maria’s life.

Conflict surfaces when a music reporter for Le Figaro pulls a dirty trick and then confronts Maria outside the rehearsal auditorium with the view that her voice is irreparably ragged. But Knight’s script doesn’t capitalize on this as a moment of self-reckoning, instead limiting the scene to a distressing invasion of privacy.

The movie aims to depict a celebrated woman, whose life has been as much about sacrifice as reward, seeking to take control, to look back and see the truth as death approaches. But its moments of illumination are hazy. There’s little that comes close to the compassion and insight Larraín brought to his portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, even though it’s very much of a piece with those movies.

In fact, the most heartbreaking moment for me came at the end, when the film returns to the day of Callas’ death from a heart attack, aged just 53. A high-pitched shriek that at first sounds like some strangled note from an aria is revealed to have come from one of her poodles, the dog’s cry of anguish becoming a loud expression of the hushed sorrow shown by Ferruccio and Bruna (Favino and Rohrwacher are both wonderful) as they reach for each other’s hand for comfort.

Still, Maria is a far more daring and unconventional take on the final chapter of the legendary soprano’s life than Franco Zeffirelli’s boilerplate 2002 biopic, Callas Forever , starring Fanny Ardant. And Larraín’s film becomes retroactively more affecting when the lovely archival images of Callas over the end credits, full of vitality at the peak of her career, widen the perspective on her sad, accelerated decline.

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‘Conclave’ Review: Ralph Fiennes, Looking Tortured, Leads a Tense Search for a New Pope

Few writers delve into the bowels of power quite like novelist Robert Harris, whose smart Vatican-set drama brings out a less bombastic side of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' director Edward Berger.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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If you think the American presidential election has been unpredictable, wait’ll you see how capricious things get at the Vatican when the cardinals assemble to choose a new pope in “ Conclave .” Adapted from the Robert Harris novel by Edward Berger , who assumes a very different challenge after “All Quiet on the Western Front,” this thinking man’s thriller unfolds like a murder mystery behind the locked doors of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where the College of Cardinals is cloistered, except no one suspects foul play in the previous pontiff’s death.

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The unenviable task of trying to corral these strong-willed men for the all-important vote falls to Fiennes’ character, Cardinal Lawrence, who reluctantly serves as dean of the process, relieved to know he will soon be reassigned far from the Holy See. It’s a quietly conflicted performance for Fiennes, who appears ravaged by Lawrence’s internal struggle between devotion and doubt. In private conversations with Cardinal Bellini (Tucci) — the papabile for whom he repeatedly casts his ballot — he admits to the crisis in his own faith. He’s surprised to learn that the late pope had doubts as well; his were with the future of the church, however.

Though “Conclave” plays like a thriller, with disorienting jump cuts and a tense string score to match, what makes it so compelling are its insights into the embattled institution, whose past leaders have included a former member of the Hitler Youth (Pope Benedict XVI) and those who covered up sex abuse cases (Pope John Paul II). Straughan’s script acknowledges as much, and while it’s not as philosophically satisfying as the imagined conversation of “The Two Popes” a few years back, it does articulate — in no fewer than four languages, including Latin — how the church must evolve in order to remain relevant to a fast-evolving world, allowing Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a soft-spoken cardinal from Kabul, of all places, to enlighten the others.

“Conclave” is one of those rare films that respects the audience’s attention, even as it sneaks a few tricks behind their backs, like the way one candidate climbs with each passing vote. But where does that character’s support come from? In any case, we’re more focused on the war of words between the liberal and conservative factions of the church, during which Lawrence wrestles with his conscience. A few of his peers cast their votes for Lawrence, who insists he’s unworthy. Still, he encourages the cardinals to select someone “who sins and asks for forgiveness,” over the charlatan who claims to be pure.

Berger is clearly fascinated by the pomp and protocol of the actual vote-taking, which occurs in the Sistine Chapel (or a convincing replica thereof, built on the stages of Cinecittà). The helmer meticulously depicts how ballots are filled out, folded and ceremoniously deposited into a large silver urn, then counted, bound and burned. The public (never seen) gather beyond the walls, studying the chimney above the Sistine Chapel. Black smoke means the cardinals have not reached a majority. When the smoke turns white, however, the new pontiff has been chosen.

Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Aug. 30, 2024. Also in Toronto, Zurich, San Sebastian film festivals. MPA Rating: PG. Running time: 120 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-U.S.) A Focus Features release and presentation, in association with FilmNation Entertainment, Indian Paintbrush, of a House, FilmNation Entertainment production. Producers: Tessa Ross, Juliette Howell, Michael A. Jackman, Robert Harris, Alice Dawson. Executive producers: Steven Rales, Glen Basner, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka, Ben Browning, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen, Zoё Edwards, Harry Dixon, Paul Randle, Tomas Alfredson, Edward Berger, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Straughan, Robyn Slovo, Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Gangarossa.
• Crew: Director: Edward Berger. Screenplay: Peter Straughan, based on the book by Robert Harris. Camera: Stéphane Fontaine. Editor: Nick Emerson. Music: Volker Bertelmann.
• With: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, Brían F. O’Byrne, Carlos Diehz, Merab Ninidze, Thomas Loibl, Sergio Castellitto, Isabella Rossellini.

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