The Vigil (2019) Review

The Vigil (2019) Review

THE VIGIL is set over the course of a long, dark night in Brooklyn’s Hassidic “Boro” Park neighbourhood, following Yakov (Dave Davis, TRUE DETECTIVE), a former Hassid, who has lost his faith, and isn’t eager to go back to the insular religious community he only recently fled. But when Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), a rabbi and confidante, approaches Yakov and offers to pay him to be the shomer (watching over the dead body of a community member) for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, he reluctantly accepts the job. Shortly after arriving at the dilapidated house, Yakov realises that something is very, very wrong. This will not be a quiet vigil.

THE VIGIL offers up a tantalising premise – a young Jewish man spending a night sat alone in a living room with a covered corpse for company – and it kicks off brilliantly too with the slowly panning camerawork and an ominous score deftly building up the mood and the scares. I was expecting something along the lines of 2016’s THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE – where the storyline also had minimal people sharing space with a dead body – but whereas that film offered up startling thrills and chills throughout, THE VIGIL seems to run out of juice very early on.

This is a shame as the set-up is so strong with young Yakov unnerved by jarring sounds from upstairs, flickering house lights and a spooky older lady coldly announcing that Yakov ‘won’t work, he needs to leave now.’ What follows feels disjointed and the resulting plot arcs take the viewer out of the horror and into half-baked melodramatic flashbacks. It feels like an over-extended short story that’s reaching out for plot fillers to pad out its running time. That said writer/director Keith Thomas does show promise – he’s great at building suspense and delivering jump scares – but unfortunately he needed something more to stop THE VIGIL from running out of steam too early on.

THE VIGIL is released theatrically on 31st July 2020 in the UK and Ireland.

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