Svetlonoc

The movie starts alright, with a nice premise. But then when the story begins to play out, it's just a weird messy chain of events that not always seem connected, things happen where you'd expect more of an explanation to you - the audience - or more of at least a conversation between the characters, but no, it goes from scene to scene without really connecting or making sense. Many times I found myself thinking "wait, what?" or "But why?" The transitions from a moment to another feel wrong, it's like it lacks pieces of the movie where they actually show how things play out, or the characters having actually normal human behavior.

One example from the top of my head is, both main and co-main characters are inside a cave at night, even though they could be sleeping in a house like they were before. One of them starts freaking out because of *reasons*. She's just uneasy inside the cave and that's that. Runs out of the cave into the woods. Suddenly there's a wolf just a few meters from the cave and the character runs back to the cave, apparently scared of the wolf, meets the other person who stayed behind, hugs her crying, never mentions the threat of the wolf, and then they do breathing exercises together and go to sleep. Aaaaaand scene! Like WTF?

The characters are frustratingly one dimensional, flat, cliché and derivative. Apart from the main and co-main, the rest just seem like NPC from a video game. They just come in for a scene, have some time on camera (mostly doing something "mean") and then just disappear for sometime, before they show up once again to be a**holes one more time.

Then there's the overly used super dragged out scenes in the forest, where a character is just walking around, surrounded in mist, looking at things (mostly treetops or the sky) mesmerized, drone New Age music in the background, nothing happens and then just cut to something different once again. And you don't really know how it went from one thing to the other.

Hints of witchcraft and sorcery are also thrown here and there, but again that's never explored, it's superficial and light.

The movie, overall, lacks depth, lacks better developed characters, the storytelling here is just so bad, so disconnected, so random, that it really ruins a good premise and what could've been a good story. Also, weird choice of dividing the film in "chapters" that do nothing to give structure to this failure of a storytelling attempt.

After a shocking start, the script by Teresa Nvotová and Barbora Namerova slowly builds the story of a peasant community rooted in immovable agrarian values, according to basic concepts of duality (like a moon bath versus a sun bath, for example), which awakened my interest. The film also came labeled as "folk horror", a subgenre that is fashionable today, but that has existed since there has been cinema and has produced works about agrarian cults, human sacrifice and other aromas, with classics such as Murnau's «Tabu» to recent notable works such as the Estonian «November», the Portuguese «Alma viva», and the Chilean «Brujería», without forgetting cult films such as the Italian «Il demonio» and the British «The Wicker Man», nor the goats and inverted pentagons from Ari Aster's cinema.

However, this Slovak film is a mystery drama that places heavy emphasis on collective harassment, ignorance, sex and violence, telling us the story of a young woman who returns to her hometown, when she is called by the mayor to claim her inheritance. She ends up entangled in a patriarchal environment, full of family secrets. When the story takes the path of psychedelia, by "reconstructing" a summer holiday, I could not help but completely distance myself from the drama of the protagonist (which almost turns out to be a circus freak) to the point that the family tale lost its fascination and became a tearful melodrama. Awarded in Locarno and Sitges and renamed "Nightsiren" in the USA, proceed at your discretion.

The dark mysterious atmosphere with a touch of folk horror, the cinematography and audiovisual direction are truly captivating. The acting performances are good and especially the main female duo is great, they carry the entire film.

However, Nightsiren also has several flaws. The writing is messy at times, character behaviour is weird sometimes and the biggest problem is that almost everything is one-dimensional, there's no nuance. For example, the villagers are portrayed as mean, superstitious, prejudicial assholes. And although I understand and support that the film attempts to point out/criticise many relevant problems, I must also acknowledge that the way in which it is done is itself problematic

In terms of (Czecho)Slovakian cinema, the Nightsiren is a bold, unique and high-quality work, so despite its flaws I give it a high rating.

No pun intended - it is always hard to be a woman with an opinion. Even more so if that is true in a village. Where whispers can become rumors and those than outcries and shouts for something that does not make much sense, if you think about it rationally. Also everyone knows (or things they do), what happens around them.

It is sometimes easier to blame something else than to face reality. When a woman comes back to the village she was born, she has to learn the hard way ... well about her past, about her mother, about gossip ... and about the people that live there ... how they conduct themselves and how they project ... or are unable to admit to their own wrongdoings.

If you believe in a religion, you should ask yourself how you interpret what you believe in ... if you are able to be that self reflective that is. But back to the movie at hand. This is really well made, great location, great story and really well acted. If you like thrillers/dramas with real life implication .. and society examining ... with a touch of otherworldly flair that is ... or more than that? You have to watch to see.

This film is truly a disaster The plot is really trivial in Meta Fil you understand everything even before, the film at certain times certainly offers us something good at then ruins everything with really trivial and stupid choices as the choice from a photo model perfectly clean and depilated, this character beyond everything serves only a thing that too is at the most crammed and banal, that is, to have sex this character is a puppet without any characterization only because the film can be a scene without a scene. Gender, we must always follow the flock of sheep, that is, a screenwriter must always do what everything do, without the Pecoraro model photo would have been a good movie with the photo model Pecoraro is just a movie like many others! Model photo which is then literally forgotten by the script !!