[Film Review] The Vigil (2019)

The Vigil, which debuted in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, doesn’t just set out to be a Jewish horror movie, it sets out to be THE Jewish horror movie.

To be fair, the history of Jewish horror cinema goes back a long way, to 1915’s Yiddish-language The Golem, starring Paul Wegener as the clay statue brought to life to protect the Jewish people of Prague. The film was immensely popular, and spawned a remake five years later. However, even with this early success, very few films have ever tried to represent the complexities of Jewish life and Jewish trauma in a horror context. And understandably so, in light of the inhumanities of the 20th century. What, in fact, are those endlessly haunting images from the Holocaust, and all the many films about it, if not representations of a shared, communal trauma? These depictions of an extremity so horrifying are perhaps why there haven’t been many screen versions of a specifically Jewish horror, but they are, perhaps, part of the reason why The Vigil works so well, as it seeks to tell a story specifically set in a Jewish Orthodox neighborhood of Brooklyn, but embedded deeply in Jewish culture, history, and traditions throughout the world. 

The story centers on one Jewish funeral custom in particular, that of the Vigil, where one person, a family member or a paid Moshe, must sit with the body of the deceased to ward off evil spirits, and monsters mentioned in the Torah.    

Our hero, Yakov, played with nervy brilliance by Dave Davis, has just left his ultra-Orthodox community, and is in the process of learning how to process the new world where he finds himself - how to use technology, how to talk to women. An old acquaintance, seeking to draw him back into his faith, asks him to serve as Moshe for the night for Mr Litvak, a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. Yakov reluctantly accepts the thankless task of sitting up with the dead body. Five hours in a creepy house with a creepy (and cryptic) widow. What could go wrong?

Keith Thomas in his roles as both writer and director, deftly sets the stage with some predictably startling jump-scares. As the mounting tension grows, so too does the genuinely stunning camerawork. These visual elements, as striking and unsettling as they are, are meant to be a distraction from the real terror at the heart of it all. The monster lurking around every corner is a creature named in the Torah as the Mazzik, an ill-defined monster in scripture, that manifests in this film as a “memory monster” that feeds on traumatic memories. The Litvaks provide a wealth of material for the monster, who continually replays psychologically disturbing sequences from the darkest days of their lives, in turn receiving a banquet of pain for its trouble. Mrs. Litvak, the widow, helps Yakov to establish the rules of the beast, played with a snappy bravura by the late great Lynn Cohen, right on the line between the sinister and the senile.

The use of a trauma monster may not sound particularly original, given that we’ve already seen metaphor monsters in the likes of The Babadook or The Relic, but within the framework of this film, it’s a meaningful  link to so many aspects of the Jewish experience, from the pogroms, to the Holocaust, to a consistent history of persecution and loss. This aspect would not work if every detail of the film were not perfectly researched and lovingly crafted. Every small work of art in every frame rings true to the cultural experience, and the use of Yiddish consistently throughout feels both culturally specific and necessary to building the character of Yakov and his identity as he tries to break from one world into another, while everything seeks to pull him back in ever so slowly. The film is a reflection of anguish, a reckoning of history, but above all, a reclamation of voice.

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