Nightsiren

Original Title: Svetlonoc

Directed by: Tereza Nvotová

Country: Slovakia

Length: 106 min.

Year: 2022

Premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2022

Availability: /

GOLDEN LEOPARD - LOCARNO 2022, "CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE"

Synopsis: Šarlota returns to her childhood town in rural Slovakia, and has to cope with past traumas, related to a neighbour who was deemed a witch by the community. Secrets progressively unravel while simultaneously the embedded sexism of the society further emerges. 

RATING: 2/5 

REVIEW

Despite its premise, Nightsiren hardly employs the potentials of folklore and witchcraft, opting for a rather basic social  commentary, yet simultaneously proving the technic potentials of Tereza Nvotová in some most daring sequences.

Tereza Nvotová's rural Slovakia is much accentuated in its aggressivity and violent tendencies on women. An example is the easter tradition of "soaking", depicted in a most extreme fashion with beatings and stalking which do not belong to the custom and rarely occur in real life the way they are depicted. The function of this accentuated depiction of gender violence is to comment further on the mysoginy that still pervades society nowadays, a topic much discussed in east european cinema - let us remember last year's Hive - thus rather spent and hard to discuss with innovation.

A major flaw of the film is that it does not fully exploit the potentials of its genre aspects. Witchcraft and folklore are presented as the central topics of the film, yet they function only as an aesthetic medium rather than a form of content. The trope of the witch has been marketed as a central aspect of Nightsiren, but it never becomes pivotal or relevant enough, as the film prefers to indulge in the criticism of patriarchy. The concept of the witch itself is connotated negatively, as a sexist insult, devoid of the female empowerment potential that it could have had.

Nightsiren excels when it becomes more daring. A specific, hallucinatory and intrepid sequence in the night forest that is elevated to a very striking form of performance art and that overshadows the entirety of the rest of the film, leaving one wondering why wasn't that route taken in the narrative, instead of the more mainstream one. It is a scene that proves the creative potential of Nvotová, but that also is sadly a very small portion of the film and is unable alone to improve it as a whole.
Nightsiren is overall a slight disappointment because it chooses a more average and simplicistic path then what its premise suggests. It also does have some interesting - albeit overly secondary - visual concepts that deserve further development in future works.

Originally posted on the instagram page on August 13, 2022