Nightsiren

This film is truly a disaster The plot is really trivial in Meta Fil you understand everything even before, the film at certain times certainly offers us something good at then ruins everything with really trivial and stupid choices as the choice from a photo model perfectly clean and depilated, this character beyond everything serves only a thing that too is at the most crammed and banal, that is, to have sex this character is a puppet without any characterization only because the film can be a scene without a scene. Gender, we must always follow the flock of sheep, that is, a screenwriter must always do what everything do, without the Pecoraro model photo would have been a good movie with the photo model Pecoraro is just a movie like many others! Model photo which is then literally forgotten by the script !!

After a shocking start, the script by Teresa Nvotová and Barbora Namerova slowly builds the story of a peasant community rooted in immovable agrarian values, according to basic concepts of duality (like a moon bath versus a sun bath, for example), which awakened my interest. The film also came labeled as "folk horror", a subgenre that is fashionable today, but that has existed since there has been cinema and has produced works about agrarian cults, human sacrifice and other aromas, with classics such as Murnau's «Tabu» to recent notable works such as the Estonian «November», the Portuguese «Alma viva», and the Chilean «Brujería», without forgetting cult films such as the Italian «Il demonio» and the British «The Wicker Man», nor the goats and inverted pentagons from Ari Aster's cinema.

However, this Slovak film is a mystery drama that places heavy emphasis on collective harassment, ignorance, sex and violence, telling us the story of a young woman who returns to her hometown, when she is called by the mayor to claim her inheritance. She ends up entangled in a patriarchal environment, full of family secrets. When the story takes the path of psychedelia, by "reconstructing" a summer holiday, I could not help but completely distance myself from the drama of the protagonist (which almost turns out to be a circus freak) to the point that the family tale lost its fascination and became a tearful melodrama. Awarded in Locarno and Sitges and renamed "Nightsiren" in the USA, proceed at your discretion.

Okay, here we go. This was unfortunately not a very good movie. The acting was pretty bad all over the board (one scene in particular, including a drunk woman, was especially jarring), but my biggest issue with it was by far the screenplay. The overarching story didn't work at all for me.

The basic premise of the movie is that a woman returns to her native mountain village where she grew up because of unclear reasons. From there the plot development is pretty much nonexistent, the main character mostly walks around in the village and surrounding forest with her newly found friend. Things happen a bit randomly. There are hints of sorcery and witchcraft going on that is tied into the narrative, but isn't explored in any meaningful way throughout the film.

The villagers, that initially are suspicious of the newly arrived woman, are laughably one-note. They are depicted as extremely horrible people with no other traits (or even a personality). There are several disturbing scenes in the movie, including nudity, sex and rape, that makes no sense whatsoever plot-wise. I'm not sure why those were included at all, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. The ending is equally disconnected from the rest of the film. What was even the point of all this?

The only strength this movie has is that it actually looks pretty good. The foggy moonlit forest creates an unnerving atmosphere, and the Slovak mountain ranges are a great backdrop for the story. It is a shame then that the rest of the movie is such a mess.

(Seen at the 2022 Stockholm International Film Festival)

The movie starts alright, with a nice premise. But then when the story begins to play out, it's just a weird messy chain of events that not always seem connected, things happen where you'd expect more of an explanation to you - the audience - or more of at least a conversation between the characters, but no, it goes from scene to scene without really connecting or making sense. Many times I found myself thinking "wait, what?" or "But why?" The transitions from a moment to another feel wrong, it's like it lacks pieces of the movie where they actually show how things play out, or the characters having actually normal human behavior.

One example from the top of my head is, both main and co-main characters are inside a cave at night, even though they could be sleeping in a house like they were before. One of them starts freaking out because of *reasons*. She's just uneasy inside the cave and that's that. Runs out of the cave into the woods. Suddenly there's a wolf just a few meters from the cave and the character runs back to the cave, apparently scared of the wolf, meets the other person who stayed behind, hugs her crying, never mentions the threat of the wolf, and then they do breathing exercises together and go to sleep. Aaaaaand scene! Like WTF?

The characters are frustratingly one dimensional, flat, cliché and derivative. Apart from the main and co-main, the rest just seem like NPC from a video game. They just come in for a scene, have some time on camera (mostly doing something "mean") and then just disappear for sometime, before they show up once again to be a**holes one more time.

Then there's the overly used super dragged out scenes in the forest, where a character is just walking around, surrounded in mist, looking at things (mostly treetops or the sky) mesmerized, drone New Age music in the background, nothing happens and then just cut to something different once again. And you don't really know how it went from one thing to the other.

Hints of witchcraft and sorcery are also thrown here and there, but again that's never explored, it's superficial and light.

The movie, overall, lacks depth, lacks better developed characters, the storytelling here is just so bad, so disconnected, so random, that it really ruins a good premise and what could've been a good story. Also, weird choice of dividing the film in "chapters" that do nothing to give structure to this failure of a storytelling attempt.

The dark mysterious atmosphere with a touch of folk horror, the cinematography and audiovisual direction are truly captivating. The acting performances are good and especially the main female duo is great, they carry the entire film.

However, Nightsiren also has several flaws. The writing is messy at times, character behaviour is weird sometimes and the biggest problem is that almost everything is one-dimensional, there's no nuance. For example, the villagers are portrayed as mean, superstitious, prejudicial assholes. And although I understand and support that the film attempts to point out/criticise many relevant problems, I must also acknowledge that the way in which it is done is itself problematic

In terms of (Czecho)Slovakian cinema, the Nightsiren is a bold, unique and high-quality work, so despite its flaws I give it a high rating.