It abrogates what came before it and has nothing to do with the originality

"The Figil" succeeds in performance and fails to see

picture

"The Vigil" is one of those films that look good on paper, but they need a director with a distinct vision that puts them in an appropriate form. This is a modern American-Jewish horror film about a young man whose connection to his religion was weak for some reason, and he returned to him to face his fears.

We use the word modern because the film alludes to the personal, family and tribal problems dominated by modernity, of a young Jew, but without rising to the levels established in the 1973 movie The Exorcist, the film that laid the foundations of modern horror cinema.

"The Figil" is nothing more than an imitation of what came before it, from The Unborn in 2009 to The Apparition in 2012, but what makes the film a little disappointing is that the viewer feels that it is a product assembled in a factory, and not a reflection of the identity crisis of its protagonist.

The shy young man, Yakov (Dave Davis), begins to see strange things after accepting the mission of "Schumer", meaning a corpse guard. Yakov is in desperate need of money and agrees to spend a night in a house, with a covered body sitting behind him and without a soul, and in the Jewish tradition, the corpse of any person without relatives Or a loved one who needs a guard to spend the last night with, explains the prequel.

Yaakov is bankrupt and cannot pay for antidepressants, so the demons that appear to him may only be in his head, the important thing is that he sees them in a semi-lit room, in which the body of Robin Lethal (Ronald Cohen) lies.

Robin has a wife, embodied by Lyn Cohen, who died in February 2020, and she is the real wife of Cohen, the actor with the corpse in the film, and this is her penultimate film, and despite Lynn's presence, this is Yakov's movie.

“The Figil” ostensibly about a struggle to maintain Yakov’s attachment to his religion, which he neglected for reasons that are unclear, or was explained with extreme negligence. Inwardly, it is a very personal movie that does not explain much about his personality. We do not want an explanation for the horror. It is better to leave it ambiguous, but we need to relate to the character, and the movie Not much is explained about it.

What we see is a cliché about the immersion of young people born in the new millennium, and what is meant here is the Jewish youth in a secular life far from religion. We see Yakov using the "FaceTime" program to communicate with a young woman who finally got acquainted with her immediately after sitting in front of the corpse.

Yaakov most of the time in the dark, whether in the darkness of the room or the darkness of his life, the words of a Jewish psychotherapist, Dr. Marvin Kohlberg (Fred Melamed), whose voice we only hear on the phone, illuminate the path of his life, as well as Robin to destroy himself the owner of the corpse, which we see in an old video on The TV lectures about demons.

And there is the Hasidim Rabbi, one of the Jewish sects, Rib Sholim (Minash Lustig), the man who asked Yakov to carry out the guard duty for $ 400, the rabbi leaves the film as soon as the hero enters the body.

There is of course the aforementioned Litvac wife who knows, as soon as his eyes fall on her, that she will ask Yakov to leave immediately, but she changes her mind later and says that it is too late to get out of the house, because the malicious entity inside the house will catch up with Yakov if he leaves.

And asking him to leave is a cliché so consuming that the writer of this topic repeated her words out loud as soon as he entered the character, even if all the words were not identical!

The climax scene in the movie is Yakov's prayer to eliminate the malicious entity, where he tied his hand and forehead with leather straps (tefillin), and this prayer is a symbolic scene linking the character to the past that she left.

Of course, we hear the music in this scene to reflect the transformation of Yakov and his rise as a hero defeating the evil demon.

This is a horror movie that has nothing to do with originality, and all it does is to highlight horror elements copied from other films, the most famous of which is the aforementioned "Exorcist", especially the 360-degree rotation of the neck.

This is a very superficial film in terms of script, and even the horror scenes themselves are devoid of any creativity.

The film's emptiness may be intentional, that is, it is an invitation to the viewer to see himself inside the character through his struggle against the crisis of her identity, but to be true it was more worthy of director, Keith Thomas, and this is his first film, to find something frightening in the behavior of Yaakov himself and build on it.

Thomas uses all or most of the horror sub-genres, so the idea of ​​the movie is a struggle against a demon and this is a direction that depends on the shots that scare the viewer using sound effects, and this is a well-known feature of this trend, as well as employing the body horror direction in the entry of the entity into Davis’s body, as well as the appearance shot Robin on an old screen, this is a horror trend called Found Footage.

Regardless of what we have mentioned, the film is not boring, and it is best described as a very advanced practical training for a graduate of film studies, Davis's performance is beautiful, which holds the film to a large extent, but without saving it, because performance alone is not enough to save a film devoid of creativity and vision But truth be told, Davis gives the movie its best.

• The film's emptiness may be intentional, meaning that it invites the viewer to see himself inside the character through his struggle against her identity crisis.

• Performance alone is not enough to save a movie that is devoid of creativity and vision, but truth be told, Davis gives the film its best.

• This is a very superficial film in terms of script, and even the horror scenes themselves are devoid of any creativity.

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