If there was any justice in this world, director Rahul Sadasivan would have had a three-picture deal with Blumhouse immediately after the release of his film, Bhoothakalam. Instead, we can collectively prepare for whatever fresh hell that Dinesh Vijan is currently cooking up. Released on SonyLIV in January, the almost impossibly well-made horror picture whittles the genre down to its bare essence, with a disregard for jump scares that comes across as positively rebellious.
Every now and then, amid the din of franchise filmmaking, along comes a filmmaker who dares to buck the trend. Just last year, while audiences were flipping out about the newest Halloween and Conjuring sequels, and a cult of fans was forming in real time around James Wan’s Malignant, director Keith Thomas announced himself as a singular talent with the release of The Vigil, one of the best horror films in recent memory.
Like Bhoothakalam, which is sure to anger many viewers with its deliberate pace and utter lack of ‘action’, The Vigil was a horror movie that valued sustained terror over momentary shock. It was, ostensibly, about a 20-something tasked with the very real job of ‘keeping vigil’ over the dead body of a recently deceased elderly man, in an Orthodox Jewish custom to protect the departed soul from demonic attack. The body is kept in the dead person’s house overnight, before it can be ritualistically buried the next day. Over the course of harrowing evening, our protagonist experiences strange events which evolve from mild poltergeist activity into something so terrifying that he is left completely discombobulated.
Of course, the film wasn’t simply about a man trapped in a haunted house with the dead body of a Holocaust survivor; it was a broad allegory about the passing on of generational pain. The protagonist was somewhat of a lapsed Jew, a disillusioned dude who was learning to assimilate into ‘regular’ culture after years of indoctrination at the hands of an insular community. Had it not been so darn good at scaring the living daylights out of you, The Vigil would have been equally successful as a drama.
