Review: The Vigil Confidently Roots Its Horror in Jewish Culture and Mysticism

Keith Thomas’s The Vigil has a premise so inherently creepy that it’s a wonder that it’s never been used as grist for the horror mill until now. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), a recent defector from the Hasidic Jewish community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is approached outside of a support group meeting for others like him by his former rabbi (Menashe Lustig), who asks him to serve as a “shomer” for the night. In accordance with Jewish tradition, he must watch over the body of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, Rubin Litvak, to protect his soul until his remains can be interred. Though reticent to return to the community from which he’s trying so hard to break free, Yakov needs the money, and so he agrees to spend the night at the Litvak house, sitting in the living room with Mr. Litvak’s corpse laid out on a table while his dementia-addled widow (Lynn Cohen) retires upstairs.

Seemingly taking a cue from André Øvredal’s similarly corpse-centric horror thriller The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Thomas’s confidently constructed debut hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth. In a particularly patient and assured long take, we watch as Yakov sits down at a table, his back to Mr. Litvak, and pops in earbuds to listen to music. Nothing exactly happens in this sequence, but Thomas’s shadowy, lamp-lit composition invites us to survey every single inch of frame—to spot the corpse in motion or, a perhaps, a ghost in the corner of the screen. And as you stare at this scene for what comes to feel like an eternity, you may even start to see things that aren’t really there.

Of course, plenty of spectral apparitions and things that go bump in the night do figure into The Vigil, which employs all sorts of tried-and-true methods to scare us, from morphing bodies to a toenail peeling out of the skin. But if the film’s big scares aren’t especially original, they’re nevertheless executed with care and precision, and Thomas manages to work in some distinctly Jewish Orthodox customs into the proceedings, such as a payot that’s pulled out of a character’s mouth and the tefillin, which is used as a kind of armor for spiritual combat in the film’s climactic confrontation between Yakov and a demon known as the Mazzik.

It’s this cultural specificity that gives the film its singular punch. With a few notable exceptions, such as Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s silent classic The Golem and Michael Mann’s The Keep, Jewish themes have remained largely unexplored in the annals of horror cinema. J. Hoberman, writing about Ole Bornedale’s Dybbuk-themed The Possession suggested that “the past hundred years of Jewish history have been sufficiently horrendous to preclude the possibility of a Jewish horror film,” but Thomas shows how that dark history can be elegantly incorporated into a relatively straightforward genre film without overwhelming it.

Like Marcin Wrona’s Demon, The Vigil links the evil spirit at its center to the Holocaust, to suggest the terrible weight of the past, but also to get at something even more insidious and unsettling: the Jews’ forced participation in anti-Semitic violence. If Thomas is a bit heavy-handed in expressing this theme through the prism of horror—at one point, Yakov faces the demon and finds that it has his own face—the film’s ambition and sensitivity around invoking real-world violence is impressive to behold. With The Vigil, Thomas hasn’t simply put a Jewish spin on a standard paranormal chiller story, but rather used the tools of the horror genre to express a sense of tragedy deeply rooted in his own cultural history.