The Vigil Review: Dave Davis horror movie is just the right tinge of spooky with grief as the main villain pinkvilla.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from pinkvilla.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“The Vigil” is a modern Jewish-American horror movie, if only in the sense that it hints at personal problems of familial and tribal guilt and responsibility without ever transcending genre tropes that were established in “The Exorcist.” I want to dismiss this sort of horror pastiche because “The Vigil” often feels like more of what recently came before it in “The Unborn” from 2009 and “The Apparition” in 2012. But what makes “The Vigil” so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis: shy guy Yakov (Dave Davis) starts seeing things after he, needing money, assumes the role of a “shomer,” or a “watchman” who’s paid to sit overnight with a dead body if the deceased has no available friends or loved ones, as an opening title explains.