In the Flesh: The Vigil

There’s something almost preternaturally sad about Dave Davis’s face, a sense of noble but all-encompassing defeat in his slack jaw, gaunt cheeks, and bruised eyes. As Yakov Ronen, a mentally ill and traumatized young man trying and failing to make his way in the world after leaving New York city’s insular Hasidic community, he’s practically radioactive with misery, a husk of a person hardly able to get through a conversation without popping Ativan. There’s nothing particularly unique about the film’s setup, a standard sublimation of generational trauma into a lurking entity, but between the richness of its Hasidic neighborhood setting and the mournful, idiosyncratic faces of its key performers, The Vigil more than earns its place in the genre. It’s also one of the few Blumhouse productions I’ve seen to effectively skirt the studio’s notoriously stingy budgetary restrictions, its handful of sets and outdoor shots lush with detail and intimately lived-in.

The film’s other great strength is the complexity of the trauma around which it revolves. On the surface it’s a standard dead child, tragic and ugly, but beneath that is the subtler violence of Hasidic culture, suffering passed down and distilled until it becomes a complete identity, so xenophobic and reactive that it can’t abide even the briefest contact with anything outside itself. Consider the mazzik, the spirit which haunts the body of the late Mr. Litvak (Ronald Cohen) and seeks to attach itself to Yakov when he comes to the Litvaks’ apartment to sit shiva. To Litvak, the entity was a constant, malignant manifestation of an execution a Nazi officer forced him to perform during the war. It kept him inside all his adult life, tormenting him with unbearable pain whenever he ventured past the front door of his apartment. In Yakov, wounded by his younger brother’s death during an altercation with anti-semitic thugs, it sees a way to keep Litvak’s pain alive, to retain his suffering within the community.

The mazzik’s design is strong, one of the best of the “shadowy, long-fingered monstrosity” school. Director Keith Thomas deploys it sparingly, mostly as an amorphous clot of darkness twitching and skittering in the background of shots. When it does come into focus, its awkward, limping shuffle and gnarled hands give an impression of both great old age and animal hunger, its backward-facing countenance clearly suggesting the unending pull of past trauma on the traumatized. The Vigil’s story is neat and clean, Yakov’s arc both moving, the apartment in which the bulk of the film takes place gruelingly claustrophobic. Strong craftsmanship and a patient, unpretentious camera elevate this story of communal grief and loss and make a promising case for Thomas’s career in film.