The Vigil Review: A horror flick that plagues the mind

So, despite having recently quit the sectarian Jewish community, he gets pulled back in to serve as a shomer, keeping vigil over a dead body so that its soul stays protected until its burial.

The Vigil
U/A: Horror, thriller
Dir: Keith Thomas
Cast: Dave Davis, Lynn Cohen, Menashe Lustig

Writer-director Keith Thomas’ debut feature is a horror movie set in the Orthodox Jewish community of Brooklyn.  Yakov (Dave Davis), a young man suffering from PTSD following his young brother’s traumatic death and undergoing therapy with support group follow-ups, knows he needs to work to survive. So, despite having recently quit the sectarian Jewish community, he gets pulled back in to serve as a shomer, keeping vigil over a dead body so that its soul stays protected until its burial.

It’s a nightmarish experience for him since it brings back all his fears into play while etching out a ghost/monster (dybbuk — Yiddish for evil spirit) potential transposition from the dead host to a live one. The narrative covers just one night of hell and the chilling trauma envisaged here is highly suggestive and likely to give you the heebie-jeebies. The film does not employ the much overused ‘by the numbers’ jump scare tradition expected from regular horror flicks. Instead, we have a systematic psychological build-up that engages your thinking while spinning out an imminently logical framework for what transpires on screen.

Thomas’s screenplay marries the suggestive and the possible using orthodox Judaism rituals and historic experiences while casting a wide net for psycho-social dysfunctions ailing its cast of characters. Yakov is struggling with his own demons following his brother’s death and subsequent estrangement from his orthodox community, the widow Mrs Litvak (Lynn Cohen) at whose home the vigil is taking place, has dementia while the dead man was someone who survived the atrocities of the holocaust.

The specific milieu, the switching of dialogues between English and Yiddish and illuminating references to the Torah and the Talmud lend vivid authenticity to this creative work. This is a crafty horror film made even more intense and ominous by inventive sound direction and shadowy cinematography by Zach Kuperstein. This is definitely no run-of-the-mill scarefest and there’s no profuse bloodletting either. This film is neither showy nor overdone. It’s a simple, sincere telling that has the power to plague your mind.

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