The Vigil (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

I always enjoy when the typical possession or exorcism movie trades its trappings from Catholicism to another religious tradition. To name a few favorites: The Babadook and Relic were more about developmental psychology, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was more ecumenical if not universal (much like The Soul Collector / 8: A South African Horror Story), The Wailing drew from Korean shamanism, Arabic spiritual horror reached Western audiences in Under the Shadow, and Jewish folklore provided the inspiration for The Possession in 2012. This last mention is key moving forward now, with the new title The Vigil also concerning Jewish mythology, though with a distinctly different focus.

Yakov (Dave Davis) is in trouble. Unemployed and recently having left his Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, he founders for connection. Shy and meek, we gather that he has undergone some traumatic event, no doubt exacerbated by guilt or shame associated with his family, faith, and ethnicity. So when he is approached by an Orthodox acquaintance for a job, he takes it out of necessity, and we can see his psyche starting to fracture. The task, we learn from the film's opening text, is that of a "Shomer," a watchful guardian who is paid to sit near a dead body overnight. It's a tradition born from guarding the deceased against grave robbers or scavengers, but some traditions believe one's spirit remains near its body until the funeral.

Shortly after entering the house of recently deceased Rubin Litvak and his wife (a wonderful Lynn Cohen), Yakov feels ill at ease. Is he just tired, stressed, and desperate to make his ends meet? Or could the trauma experienced by Mr. Litvak -- a Holocaust survivor -- be somehow triggering Yakov's own trauma? It doesn't take long for us to learn this mysterious even may have had a part in him abandoning his faith community; and why does he keep hearing the disembodied voice of someone asking why he let them die? The Litvak house is very dark, and the filmmakers seem determined to make this a veritable haunted house, with some dark force moving in the shadows and toying with Yakov's sanity. But we're never quite allowed to know if it is all simply in his mind, shadowy manifestations of his guilt, or if there is indeed something more diabolical afoot.

Aesthetically, the film is moody, broody, and dark, but offers little novelty in the way of visuals or sound design. Thematically, the film is also moody, broody, and dark, but locked in its own mind and that of its introverted protagonist. Unlike The Ritual, which dealt with similar themes among a small group of characters (who could then verbalize these matters), here most of the emotional weight must be intuited. We get some help, but frankly it's uninspired: Yakov is literally "in the dark," searching for a light to guide him out, often in the form of him texting or Facetiming people during his long night's vigil. Then of course there's his therapist (Fred Melamed), not seen but heard over the phone, and Mr. Litvak himself, who recorded his ramblings about the demonic manifestations of guilt in the form of a "Mazzik."

It's all a nice atmospheric descent into one man's search for escape from trauma and a religious tradition, which is at once nothing new since The Exorcist but still pretty cool to see from a Jewish-American perspective. It's also not particularly scary -- more sad than anything -- and, worse, not particularly interesting. Mrs. Litvak is a bit wasted as a character, though thankfully the film didn't turn her dementia into anything demoniac, and the idea that the parasitic villain will simply transfer to Yakov makes the film, in the end, pretty nihilistic. Then again, The Vigil features, in its climax, what amounts to a Jewish Rambo, when Yakov wraps his tefillin around his arm and head to confront the demon and his guilt. The synthesizer music shifts us into an '80s nostalgic mindset, and faceless spirits push through the walls of the Litvak home like something out of Poltergeist or A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's easily the best scene in the film; too bad my mind was already starting to drift by that point.