The Vigil: Laid To Rest

As movie monsters go, you can’t get more classic than the ghost. They’re generally portrayed as restless, tethered to our world by something unfinished or unresolved. Sometimes they’re benign, sometimes they’re vengeful, but that’s their thing: They can’t move on. They can be read as an externalization of our regrets, or our fear of regret. We are haunted by the things we can’t let go.

And The Vigil is an excellent example of how the idea of the ghost can work both as a monster and a metaphor. It’s spooky, thoughtful, and surprisingly moving.

We open on a room in what looks like a community center or a church annex, with a group of people sitting around, relating the events of the last week. A woman talks about asked out, and how oddly forward it felt. A man is asked how a job interview went, and he relates that it didn’t go as well as it could have, noting that he’d made the mistake of handwriting his resume on a piece of loose-leaf paper. These are people who seem to be brand new to modern life, despite being fully grown. And as it turns out, that’s exactly the case - they’re all former Hasidim, who’ve left a very cloistered, insular life behind, and are struggling to adjust to a culture that is almost entirely foreign to them. This is a support group, then, where they share their successes and get tips on how to navigate this new existence more easily.

Yakov Ronen - he of the loose-leaf resume - is having a rough time of it. He’s having trouble finding work, he’s having trouble making rent, he’s down to choosing between buying food or the medication he takes for his panic attacks. And so as the group is departing for the night, waiting outside on the street, is Reb Shulem, the rebbe for the community these people have left behind. You get the sense he’s done this before - waited outside, trying to coax the strays back into the flock, and the group leader is very unhappy to see him. But he tells Yakov he has work for him. A member of the community has passed away, and Shulem needs a shomer - someone to hold vigil over the deceased until morning.

Typically this is a volunteer, someone who knew the deceased, but in cases where none are available, someone can be paid to perform the service, and the deceased was reclusive, estranged from pretty much everyone in his life except his wife, never leaving the house. Yakov’s not really in much of a position to refuse $400 for five hours’ worth of work, so he goes with the rebbe to the house of the deceased. It’ll just be him, the body, and the deceased’s widow, who is elderly and frail and expected to sleep through the night. They had someone lined up, but he left suddenly.

Well, he fled the house, to be precise. He said there was something in the house with him. Something…wrong.

What follows is very much a long, dark night of the soul. Yakov is left alone in the apartment not just with the deceased and the widow, but as it transpires, he’s also left alone with his own disconnection from his old community and heritage, his own guilt and unresolved trauma around the tragedy that drove him out of the community, and on top of that, there is some extremely weird shit happening in this apartment, and soon enough everything comes to a head. There is some real ambiguity here in terms of how much of this is actually happening, and how much of it is potentially hallucination, brought on by a lack of sleep or food or medication. I do think the film commits to a particular reading, but it doesn’t do so right away, leaving things open for awhile. It begins as you’d expect, with the requisite mysterious noises and things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, but as the film moves on it becomes harder and harder for dismiss what’s happening as the product of an overactive imagination. I don’t know that it’s especially innovative on that front (though it does make some interesting choices), but it’s executed skillfully and with a decent amount of restraint. The film does a good job of escalating tension - it’s a spooky, atmospheric apartment, all dim lighting and staircases going up into the dark, and though it’s a small location there’s a real sense of geography, where things start to feel more dangerous the further away from the living room Yakov goes - a feeling that there are terrible things just outside of the range of the few lights that are on. It’s especially effective in the climax, a confrontation set at the end of a long, narrow hallway, lit only by candlelight. There’s something of the nightmare about it, cryptic and awful without being obtuse.

It’s visually inventive as well, in a way that low-budget indie films sort of have to be. Everything is shot with a lens that makes shots look at little warped and distorted around the very edges, a subtle fisheye effect that lends everything a sense of slight unreality and unease, and shots often transition with a very brief stutter or fast-forward effect that further heightens the feeling of dislocation. Yakov spends a fair amount of time on his phone, and his text messages and web search results are superimposed on the screen next to him - it’s highly artificial, but it works because it’s less disruptive than constant cuts to the screen of his phone and provides us with more insight into his character without just telling us things. The action moves between the present and flashbacks to Yakov’s past, so as the film goes on we get a better sense of what’s brought him to this place in his life, and like the rest of the film, the flashbacks are set at night, grainy from low light punctuated by streetlights and lens flare which again make everything feel slightly otherworldly, like a fragmented dream.

Where this film falls down is in a tendency to try too hard. There’s a flashback at the beginning that is creepy and atmospheric, the scenes in the support group are natural and comfortable, and there's a real sense of tension between Yakov and the rebbe, but then a lot of that restraint and subtlety gets left behind once the vigil begins. The soundtrack is pretty obtrusive, all full of ominous strings and brass and synthesizer that often double and triple-underline things that need very little highlighting at all. The setting and the action rely on minimalism, and the constant blare of the score serves to undermine that. There’s also a couple of jump scares that the film doesn’t really need, and though they aren’t especially irritating, you sort of wish they’d gone for something a little less obvious.

But despite that, I think the film ultimately redeems itself in the end, tying Jewish mysticism (in a more respectful treatment than other films I’ve seen) and two generations’ worth of trauma and survivor’s guilt together into a story about literal and metaphorical ghosts that gives as much space to grief and sorrow and the opportunity for healing as tension and dread. It might not be a flawless film, but it’s a thoughtful and well-considered one and has some extremely evocative moments. Ultimately, it ends up being a film that eloquently addresses the need to take the things that haunt us and lay them to rest.

IMDB entry
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