Vigil

This film is a portrayal of a lonely and isolated childhood. It really has a dreary feel with all the darkness and fog. It is good at setting a tone of uncertainty and foreboding.

SPOILER: I don't know when I've seen a film that was so beautiful and yet so utterly baffling. It's not like any other movie you'll ever see. Every single image is stark and brutal--the director, Vincent Ward, is trying to enter a primitive painting and make drama out of it. And he has a perfect setting--a sheep farm in New Zealand--that comes from Thomas Hardy's accounts, in which nature wages an unending, unfathomable conspiracy against the characters. It's in the actual story Ward tells that he gets into trouble. His 12-year-old heroine, Toss (Fiona Kay) witnesses her farmer father's death from an accidental fall (as he tries to rescue a sheep) and the camera sits on her impassive face for the first of several eternities. Her restless mother (Penelope Stewart) seizes the opportunity to put the farm up for sale. Her dotty grandfather (Bill Kerr) is like every dotty grandfather in the movies--he putters around, muttering feisty-old-goat aphorisms and tinkering with whimsical machines--and quickly becomes insufferable. Ethan, (Frank Whidden) the hunter who carried the father's corpse back to the farm, shows up again looking to replace the father. Toss and her mother are both attracted and repelled by him.

In one remarkable sequence, we see Toss experimenting with Ethan's gun. She looks through the gun sights and begins tracking Ethan through the house, as if she were ambushing James Bond. When Ethan sees her, he steps boldly toward her and removes the sight, which she had taken off the gun and is holding to her eye like a telescope. We are in D.H. Lawrence sexual-awakening territory now, but the combination of Lawrence and Hardy doesn't ignite the way it should--the director's austere manner (keeping everything at a distance) begins to seem remote and rather obscure. The scenes don't follow from each other; each one goes off on its own, and the characters shift attitudes and allegiances to no clear purpose. The performers start doing a lot of staring and squinting into the camera (for LONG periods) only Stewart makes any impression, as she's the only one who actually engages with the person she's speaking to (and the only one who seems to have any grasp on reality.) The last fourth of the movie is unspeakably depressing. We finally realize that this is the kind of film where explanations and logic are left out, and the resultant confusion is presented as "depth". Fascinating and infuriating, in just about equal measure.

At the starting scene of the movie, I did not know what to expect..as I continued to watching..I began to drawn to each character in their own way in the movie as in the connection between the mother, the grandfather, the poacher (the stranger).All together in one. But the real star in the story is TOSS- the little girl who witness her father's death. Throughout the whole movie, one begin to see how she is coping by her father's departure and somewhat feel alienated she wore an hawk-like hat to cover her face from the rest of the world ..and coming of age to discover who she really is and most of all the value of her womanhood.

The movie is a bit slow but it has a nice background based on its time, kinda bluish-gray mixing with different weathers during the scenes which made it magnificent and captivating to watch..Don't expect drama or actions..This movie is somewhat for the innocent. Just a feel-good movie. Go your nearest store; buy or rent it. You will enjoy it..

A beautifully photographed movie where the characters seem more than usually shaped by their surroundings. The unremitting cold wet climate in the unforgiving New Zealand hills forces those making a life there to spend more of an effort than your average city dweller. The father dies, the grandfather goes crazy, the mother seeks another life or another partner and the little girl accepts it all because it is all she has known. I was reminded of Samuel Beckett and also of Werner Herzog and perhaps there is something of each of them here. The constant and wearing daily effort just to stay alive and an urge to test oneself further, almost to build castles in the sky. As with the writer there is also just enough humour to keep us engaged and to distract us occasionally from the absolute desperation and futility of those efforts. Not an easy or speedy watch but thoughtful, worthwhile and ultimately optimistic.

My Rating : 8/10

'Beans up your...'

'Vigil' is about a lonely young girl living with her family on an isolated, mist-cloaked farm and the disturbing realities she faces along the way.

Beautiful, funny and grand - don't be fooled by it's minimalist settings but try and look for the primal feelings of childhood which is captured so wonderfully.

Highly recommended.