Nightstream 2020: ‘An Unquiet Grave’ carves to the core of death & grief

Grief can not be controlled. You can club it over the head, bind it with twine, and bury it in the cold, hard earth. You think you can lay it to rest, but it will inevitably squirm its way back out of the dirt and into the brain, like some parasitic worm whose sole mission is inflicting more suffering. I’ve tried to suppress my own in recent days, in the aftermath of my sister’s abrupt death, and I’m not even sure I can make sense of the canyon-sized crevice now throbbing in the middle of my chest. I go about my days, checking off items on my to-do list, and the end, my own end maybe, hangs like a dark, swirling thundercloud over my head. Grief. What a troublesome little rascal.

“I realized I had this idea in my head that if I cried hard enough, I could get her back. If I hurt enough, I could prove something,” opines Ava, played with beautiful perfection by Christine Nyland. She’s sitting in the car with her late twin sister’s widower Jamie (Jacob A. Ware), and the two grow intimate over shared trauma, that of the loss of Julia (or Jules, as she’s affectionately remembered). Life extinguished prematurely is sheer torture, and An Unquiet Grave, directed by filmmaker Terence Krey, who co-wrote the script with Nyland, combs through grief with stunning dexterity.

Julia’s death is only spoken about in the present. There are no inserted and unnecessary flashbacks, only pain in the aftermath and psychological pressure that seems suffocating. Ava and Jamie lean on one another, set up in the opening frames in which they meet at Julia’s gravesite to mourn such an unimaginable and inescapable loss. It’s been months since the fatal car accident, caused by a drunk driver, that tore their lives to ribbons, and time doesn’t seem to be doing its job. Time can be as mercilessly as the grief itself; hours and days writhe like slugs in gooey patterns on the sidewalk, their icky slime leaving a filthy trail in their wake. Time. It never does what you need it to, and it’s always excruciating.

Instead of waiting for time to heal their pain, opting to enact some sort of control over their lives, Ava and Jamie hatch a plot to resurrect their dearly departed. One night, a year following Julia’s demise, they drive out to the scene of the accident and slip into the nearby woods to a clearing ⏤ it is there upon a barren spot her body had been thrown from the crash. Jamie unpacks a blindfold, some oils, and a bottle of wine, and the two then perform a restoration ritual in order to bring Julia back from the dead.

Naturally, things never go as planned, or perhaps, human desperation is the root cause of all our (and their) subsequent miseries. Either way, grief must run its course, and no matter how much you cry or scream or flounder in your anger, nothing can bring a loved one back to life. Krey plants his tale inside of such real life terror, a far more frightening and soul-shattering premise than anything with goblins and ghouls or witches. Such inevitability awaits us all, and so Krey explores the slow death march, too, offering up a what-if scenario in which maybe if we sacrifice a part of ourselves we can stop it from happening altogether.

But no one knows what could result from such warped, short-sighted thinking. In the manner of The Haunting of Bly Manor, An Unquiet Grave sinks into the most gut-wrenching of human experiences, wielding its small scale approach to construct an imposing exhibit of suffering. Death surrounds us everyday (we know someone who knows someone who knows someone currently grieving), and we do our best to plow ahead anyway. It’s all we can do, and we just have to accept it. Jamie and Ava learn such a lesson the hard way, and Krey’s folktale crackles with the sorrow humanity has endured since the dawn of time. Simply put, it is 2020’s most surprising pictures.

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