Keith Thomas' The Vigil Review: Jewish Demons Can Possess Too, You Know
Yakov (Dave Davis) is struggling to find his footing. Having rejected life within his insular Hasidic community, the likes of which stipulates everything from who you marry down to your clothing, Yakov feels adrift in secular society; a supposed world of possibilities that he quickly realizes has as many social rules and stipulations as his former one. He’s unsure of how to get a job without experience, get a stable apartment without savings or even chat with a cute girl at a social gather for lapsed Hasidim, for starters. So when his former friend Shulem (Menashe Lustig) appears with a job offer, knowing Yakov is tight on cash, he reluctantly agrees. The job is act as a shomer, one who watches over the body of a recently deceased person overnight before the burial. But it’s not long into the night that Yakov realizes something isn’t right here–from seeing movements out of the corner of his eyes to the deceased’s unnerving wife, who wanders in a stupor of Alzheimer’s speaking of demons.
I’m not normally one for this sort of ghostly horror movie, but The Vigil (2021) caught my attention as one of the rare non-Christian demonic possession films. Finally, a movie that acknowledges that Jewish mysticism can freak people out just as well as any ol’ Christian folk horror. L’chaim! Never mind the jump scares, of which there are plenty, The Vigil’s sound design is downright terrifying on its own. Yakov is plagued by the horrifying sounds of heavy objects scraping across the floor above, echoing throughout the house like an upstairs neighbor from literal Hell. No matter what time of day you watch this movie, the sound design will make you feel like it’s 3am–playing to heightening your sense of every creek, drip, crack, and whisper. It’s that midnight paranoia of spending your first night in an unfamiliar setting and feeling all at once completely alone and perhaps not as alone as you thought.
Once incidents get too weird for Yakov to ignore, including a particularly horrifying scene with a human nail, a too-long-to-be-mine hair in mouth and a broken glass of questionable liquid, he feels compelled to get to the bottom of this. In a classic genre move, Yakov finds himself wandering against his better judgment to the basement, where an eerie glow is seen emanating and muted voices are heard. A creepy VHS-quality projection of the dead husband is seen speaking about what is called a mazzik–a damned creature with a backwards head that consumes broken souls. He says he found out too late that if you do not burn its true face within 24 hours of meeting it, it will attach to you for life.
The Vigil does a solid job of mashing up the possession/haunting genre with tech horror, mainly using Yakov’s smart phone to toy with his mind and emotions. In one particularly haunting scene, Yakov calls his psychiatrist in a moment of pure panic, who soothes him in the sort of velvety sinister voice that only Fred Melamed can. It’s not until his therapist calls back a second time that Yakov realizes the voice he had just spoken to was somebody, or something, else entirely. The movie is rife with a cornucopia of horror scares, almost a mishmash of greatest hits from every popular horror film since 2000. A little bit of The Grudge or the ghostly television tranmissions in The Ring, mixed with jumps scares from The Conjuring and even a bit of Repulsion in its final visuals. Then top it all off with some unflinching on-screen body horror to make Cronenberg proud–if you’re not a fan of cracking joints or bones bending backwards you’d do well to avoid this.
But what makes this movie truly stand out is in it actually has a solid plot–is this what we’re meant to call ‘elevated’? I’m sure all of the horror fans will tell me they’re all elevated, but I don’t know how else to describe it. The Vigil does elevate what could have been simply a creepy premise, hanging out with a dead body in a stranger’s house for 12 hours during the witching hours, into an interesting rumination on fear and depression. Eventually we learn the reason for why Yakov left his community, a reason rooted in guilt and anger towards a terrible incident involving his younger brother. When it finally dawns on Yakov that perhaps these visions are not just in his head, he immediately knows he’s vulnerable in more ways than one. The creature is not merely haunting him, but is actively exploiting Yakov’s fears and anxieties through auditory and visual manipulations.
Director and screenwriter Keith Thomas clearly choose this mazzik demon not just for its horrifying physicality but for it’s symbolic terrors. This is a creature doomed to look backwards; a lingering haunting that last eternally after only one brief interaction. It is later revealed, as it is heavily implied by the film’s opening scene, that the dead husband was an escapee from Birkenau. Having lost everything in Europe, he moved to the US after the war in an attempt to restart and reclaim his life. But he was doomed to be a man haunted by horrific memories of death, unable to escape his past. This inability to move forward is paralleled in the story of Yakov, similarly haunted by the incident involving his brother that caused him to break with Orthodoxy. Suddenly the mazzik starts to feel more like an inevitability than mere random chance.
The Vigil, for all of its genre cliches, builds skillfully to becoming less of a monster movie and more of a psychological thriller about both the fear of moving forward and the fear of forgetting. It sounds almost counterintuitive but both are intrinsically linked: if we forget the past it’s a disservice to not only those we loved, but to the lessons we have learned, and even to our own emotions. Yet if we allow the past to overtake the now, we disallow the healing process to take place. It’s a solid lesson in therapy, but it’s also an interesting parallel to ponder in light of our modern day Nazi problem and the resurgence of white supremacy.
In the end, the only cure lies buried in acknowledgement, a twist that surely any neurotic Brooklynite can appreciate (and likely see coming from a mile away). Yakov must learn to confront his own fears with the bravery that he could not muster in the past, or be doomed to live a tortured life of terror at the hands of his own demon mind. I won’t spoil the ending, but when the sun finally does rise on this long night, I won’t blame you if you have to turn on all of the lights in your house just to be sure.
Be sure of what?
Of… you know.
The Vigil is in theaters and on VOD today, February 26
