The Vigil (2019)
Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Lynn Cohen, Malky Goldman, Ronald Cohen, Fred Melamed (v.o.)
Directed by: Keith Thomas

This movie had been in my Shudder watchlist for literal years. I just never watched it. I finally did and it wasn’t really anything special.

A man providing overnight watch to a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community finds himself opposite a malevolent entity.

So first, I know absolutely nothing about Jewish culture. I got the basic drift of what was happening though. The film is half in Hebrew, so there’s some subtitles to read. The biggest problem I had with the film is that everything was always so slow. The man’s reaction times to things that are happening seems to be stretched out. Static shots on something that might move (i.e. is that body going to move?) were really really long. It felt almost like the filmmakers were trying to pad the runtime of the film. It clocks in at 89 minutes, so maybe they felt that by doing this, they’d have a decent runtime. But it just made most of the movie unbearably boring most of the time.

The acting was fine, nothing special, but fine. The makeup, however, was pretty bad. The demon hands you see near the end of the film were laughable. I don’t know if they meant to have it look so DIY, but it really does look like something I could make in my basement. It was competently shot, except of course the aforementioned long shots. I will give it credit for an interesting idea, though. A demon that feeds on pain could make a great movie. Just not this one.

So do I recommend it? Not really. There’s nothing here that I’d really say needs to be seen. Best to skip this one. It gets a 4/10 from me.

M.

This film is currently streaming on Shudder and Amazon Prime.