Movie Review: The Vigil (2019)

‘The Vigil’: Dark Night of the Soul

Keith Thomas’s new horror movie The Vigil centers around a night of shmirah, the act of guarding a dead body from the moment of death until burial. Serving as a shomer, a guard, is an unnerving task and one that seems ripe for the horror genre. “I couldn’t believe there had never been one” focused on a shomer, Thomas tells me over Zoom. Although perhaps it’s not so surprising considering the paucity of Jewish horror films out there. Even those with Jewish components usually use them more as gimmicks than as elements integral to the story. (Remember Matisyahu popping up as a dybbuk-fighting rabbi in The Possession.) With The Vigil, which is almost entirely in Yiddish and set in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, Thomas sets out to create a film “rooted in real Jewish experience and thought.”  The...

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What to Watch: The Passengers

The Abandoned Jews of Ethiopia

Jews have lived in Ethiopia for centuries, but over the past decades, the majority have emigrated to Israel, most in the well-known airlifts of Operations Moses (1984) and Solomon (1991). Now some 140,000 are citizens. Those left behind in Addis Ababa and Gondar languish in dire conditions, vividly illustrated in the beautifully shot film. 

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