Review: ‘The Vigil’ reframes the shemira, a ritual for the dead

Western culture has this strangely detached relationship with death and the dead. So much so, we are taught at an extremely young age to turn our backs on ceremony and rituals regarding the afterlife and the care of bodies. Ok sure, we have wakes and funerals, but as someone who’s been to plenty of both in my life, I can tell you there is an odd sort of anxiety that clouds the room. Even though most people in attendance might be grieving, it somehow doesn’t feel like we’re actually confronting mortality or even celebrating the beauty which lies in the end of one’s earthly existence (or actually allowed to do either). Settling in to watch Keith Thomas’ The Vigil, I was immediately spellbound by not only its tremendous heart throbbing at its core but the crevices of the human mind, from terror to sorrow and desperation, Thomas puts on full display.

The Vigil follows Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), a young man struggling financially and spiritually. Having recently left his religious community, he accepts a position as shomer, a guardian tasked with watching over the souls of the dead, from his former rabbi. He’s naturally reluctant, of course, but he’s strapped for cash. So, he spends one lonesome and cold night in the home of Mrs. Litvak (Lynn Cohen), nestled in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Borough Park. And it is her husband’s body he must care for and protect. The ritual, called a shemira, dating back 2,000 years, was originally safeguard practice against looters and rodent pests. Times have certainly changed, and now it mostly serves as a sign of respect as one’s soul passes from this world to the next. During the vigil, the shomer is expected to recite Psalms and various other religious texts as a way to soothe and guide the soul into the afterlife, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Thomas seeds his story with plenty of such truths, often fusing his own very real and haunted experiences into the mix. The Vigil is like a spooky campfire tale, riddled with mood and tension, the kind of psychological fear you can’t quite define or pin to the wall. As Ronen watches over Mr. Litvak’s body, the night begins to crush upon him from all angles, and the darkness itself becomes a character all its own. Therein lies the films most effective moments; the quiet is suffocating, and the edges of the screen seem to squirm — the peripheral unease we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. Make-believe shadows are sometimes the most frightening. And Thomas’ work shows a great understanding of subtlety, allowing those scares to be the ones that brand you the deepest. “All of them [the scares] come from my own experience – a combination of nightmares and bad memories,” he offers in his director’s statement.

The Vigil unravels both the physical and mental worlds, with the viewer given a peak into Yakov’s traumatic past. The midnight hours grow longer, and his paranoia that something just isn’t right in the house swells and further blurs the lines. You never really know if what you’re witnessing is the clouded mind of an unreliable narrator or a true-to-form entity seeking to suck the life right out of him. While the finale doesn’t nearly stick the landing as one might expect, Keith Thomas has a clear, undeniable vision about the human condition that leaps far beyond any strict cultural guidelines. We’ve all been alone and afraid and succumbing to the dark, and that’s the true terror of a film like The Vigil.

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