With her sophomore feature The Nightsiren, which won the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the Filmmakers of the Present section at Locarno, and was in the Midnight Screenings programme of the Cairo International Film Festival, Slovak director Tereza Nvotova joins a crop of female directors that have been putting a revisionist spin on portrayals of witchcraft, and spotlighting the misogynist mythologies that have fuelled fear around female independence and sexuality through the ages. She has collaborated again on screen-writing with Barbora Namerova, who was co-writer on her debut feature Filthy, about the rape of a student by her math teacher, and its traumatic aftermath within an inadequate mental health system. The pair venture into genre territory with The Nightsiren, to again question patriarchal power and the way ingrained societal prejudices enable the violent oppression of women.
Situating the film mid-way between mystery and horror, they opt for eerie atmosphere, and suspenseful ambiguity over whether or not supernatural forces are at play in its strange events, rather than relying on jump-scares and outright gore. However, there is sufficient chill in several bloody moments to unnerve those with a taste for fright. The film plays its themes straighter, and with a more sombre seriousness, than comparable recent fare, such as Charlotte Colbert’s surreal, absurdity-tinged take on eighteenth-century witch hunts and the abuses rife in today’s entertainment business, She Will. But The Nightsiren’s shared point, that a medieval desire to stigmatise rebellious women still persists today, is just as powerfully conveyed.
Natalia Germani is fiercely compelling as Sarlota, a young woman who, after receiving an inheritance letter, returns to the mountain cabin where she was raised by an abusive mother. The Slovak woodlands, moodily filmed in inky light and veils of mist, trigger memories for Sarlota in the form of vivid flashbacks, as this was the site of a childhood tragedy involving her sister’s fall from a cliff, which she has not yet come to terms with. As the film proceeds in chapters, we gradually learn more about what transpired that day. Spooky items in the hut, from a braid of hair to a teddy-bear with children’s teeth inside, reinforce the sense of an uncanny place haunted by a strange past. Sarlota’s friendship with Mira (Eva Mores), a herbalist who makes a living through gathering plants and likes to bask naked under the moon, helps her to reassess the immense guilt she feels over her sister’s death and a later miscarriage. Sarlota’s shame over not fulfilling conventional notions of motherhood and maternal urges gives way to a new connection with the wilderness. Scenes with wolves and snakes (dramatic, if somewhat hackneyed in their symbolism) mark a new acceptance of nature’s deadlier aspects.
Sarlota and Mira are suspected of witchcraft by judgmental, sanctimonious villagers, in a community in which domestic violence and infidelity are rife, and hypocrisy reigns. There is a prevailing superstition, based in Catholicism and persisting down generations, that witches snatch and sacrifice unbaptised children. It is a belief that saw a local outcast, Otyla, blamed for the girls’ fate and persecuted years before. A psychedelic sequence with coloured filters and pulsing music, in which an intoxicated dance by a burning pyre during Midsommer festivities leads into a vision of a witch coven’s frenzied pagan rituals amid the trees, is a high point of exuberant sensuality, in a film that shows that the real threat is the ever-lurking, lascivious presence of the village men. They feel entitled to use female bodies for their own pleasure or for taking out their frustrations upon, without asking permission, even as they fear and suppress women’s power and shared healing knowledge by circulating outlandish rumours and medieval legends. Flipping the typical genre script when it comes to predatory violence, The Nightsiren ultimately empowers its female protagonists, rather than presenting them as helpless victims or sources of evil to be brutally dispatched.
Director: Tereza Nvotova
Writers: Barbora Namerova, Tereza Nvotova
Editing: Thibault Hague, Pavel Hrdlicka
Cinematography: Federico Cesca
Producer: Milos Lochman
Cast: Natalia Germani, Eva Mores, Juliana Brutovska, Iva Bittova, Jana Olhova, Marek Geisberg, Zuzana Konecna, Noel Czuczor, Peter Ondrejicka
Production Design: Tomas Berka
Music: Robin Coudert, Pjoni
Production companies: Moloko Film (Czech Republic), RTVS (Slovakia)
Sales: Intramovies
Venue: Cairo
In Slovak
109 minutes
