More a thoughtful, often thought-provoking experience than a straightforward horror or indeed a folk horror, Nightsiren (2022) doles out its story of rural generational harm piecemeal, but generally carefully. Undoubtedly, it runs aground in places, but this sober, sombre film is always a visual treat with a formidable atmosphere and lots of interesting layering to unpick; if only, if only a few more loose ends were tied up.
We start with two little girls, Šarlota and younger sister Tamara, running from their abusive home into the forest which surrounds their village in rural Slovakia. It’s Šarlota who has most recently borne the brunt of their mother’s anger; Tamara is running away with her simply because she wants to be with her sister, but the little girl has a significant fall in the woods. Now additionally scared of the consequences for this, Šarlota daren’t return home and continues to run. Years later – after some unspecified time spent in ‘the city’ (Bratislava), Šarlota (Natalia Germani) returns to the village, summoned by a letter from the mayor. Her mother has passed away, and there’s the matter of an inheritance, if a questionable one: the old family home has already been burned to the ground. Šarlota has to stay in a neighbouring cabin, long rumoured to belong to a witch – a Roma woman whose history overlaps with Šarlota’s own. It seems that, in her absence, the village has retained its folk beliefs in magic, and mention of the ‘witch’ Otyla still strikes fear into them, so Šarlota’s reappearance triggers a lot of the same antipathies; she and her family are seen as bound up in the same fate, and the children’s disappearances, and reappearances, are seen in sinister, possibly even supernatural terms. Tantalisingly, Šarlota even finds memorabilia relating to her childhood at the ‘witch’s cabin’.
The village is a tough, friendless place, but Šarlota does at least befriend a local girl, Mira (Eva Mores) who puts up with the insular behaviour of the other villagers for the sake of its cheap lifestyle and abundant herbs (she’s a herbalist who makes her living selling what she finds). However, before Mira can fully inhabit her role as detached voice of reason, changes are underway and events from the past resurface, threatening to subsume Šarlota and anyone in her orbit. Just what – if any – are her links to witchcraft? And what really happened to her family?
To get anywhere near answering those questions, we receive a slow avalanche of names, details and relationships which don’t, honestly, always develop into the fullest of characters; people here are usually either good or bad, worldly or reactionary, though it does make for an appropriate level of what feels like a storytelling tradition to backfill the narrative. There are also interesting hints at local customs and beliefs, albeit curated to invoke supernatural beliefs and/or more than a touch of misogyny. On the other side of that coin, we have Šarlota speaking as a spokesperson for a range of feminine anxieties and agonies, sometimes quite literally, sometimes more figuratively, but more or less always about sex, pregnancy and the phantom of motherhood – in its way quite conservative, save for the rather surprising amount of incidental nudity. It can jar in places, fustian one moment and full-frontal in another (we rack up seven – seven – intertitles carving the film into arguably unnecessary chapters).
But there’s no arguing with the cinematography here: evocatively shot, fantastical night scenes, with the same use of natural light and candlelight which helps to make The Witch so easy on the eye, plus beautiful shots of the Slovakian/Czech countryside. This is no colour-laden folk horror, either, save for one sudden hallucinatory experience; the dominant colour is a workaday green; no one is wearing flowers in their hair here. Still, the village itself is nicely remote, and it feels as though this could be any point in time, despite the occasional flatscreen or glimpse of a mobile phone. If the film seems to be reaching for a way to invoke both the self-contained, rural community beliefs of Midsommar with the dour isolation and supernatural ambiguity of The Witch (as amply suggested by the press materials) then, hey, there are far, far worse influences, and Nightsiren is always a sumptuous viewing experience, drawing often on the natural world for symbol and scene-stealing eeriness.
Whilst it loses some of its goodwill towards the end – opting to dodge important exposition points which could have lent the whole film more of a completed feel – there is nonetheless style and ambition here, suggestive of the weight of generational, gendered expectations and the irrational ways these can play out.
Nightsiren (2022) will be receive a select US theatrical release on 22nd September 2023.