Movie Review: 'Nightsiren'

Nightsiren (2023)

Directed by Tereza Nvotova

Written by Tereza Nvotova

Starring Natalia Germani, Eva Mores, Juliana Ol'hova

Release Date September 22nd, 2023

Published September 21st, 2023

Nightsiren begins with a jarring series of shocking sequences. First, a young girl hides under the floor of her home as someone, presumably her mother, angrily calls for her. The young girl is bleeding from the head and crying and when her mother pulls her from her hiding place, she makes a daring escape. Running to the forest, the abused girl finds herself followed by her little sister. She turns to send her sister back and convince her not to follow her and she accidentally shoves her little sister off of a cliff. It's quite a fall though it's possible that the little girl survived.

Cut to 30 years later, a grown up Charlotte, the young runaway, haunted by the guilt of what happened to her sister, returns to her small village in the mountains of Slovakia. She's been told by a letter that her mother's estate is being settled. Her return is met with skepticism and fear as her childhood home had burned down just after Charlotte disappeared and many believe that the home is cursed by a witch. Seeing Charlotte living in the cottage nearby, believed to have been the home of the witch Otyla, the locals become concerned that Charlotte herself is a witch.

Not everyone is unkind however as a local named Mira (Eva Mores) begins a tentative friendship with Charlotte. She too has faced questions about her possible involvement in witchcraft. This however, has more to do with prejudice over Mira being bisexual and having had relationships with men and women in the village, allegedly. Women who are sexually liberated tend to find themselves accused of a lot of things and being a witch is a common refrain in the less educated portions of the world. Witches are believed to use sexuality as a way of controlling and destroying victims and other such superstitious nonsense.

These superstitions, rooted in a deep seated fear of female sexual power, can turn violent and indeed, when a pair of village children go missing, Charlotte and Eva find themselves accused of taking the children for some sort of witchcraft related ceremony. It doesn't help that the night of the kids disappearance Eva dosed herself, Charlotte and a local sheep herder that Charlotte is attracted to, with some kind of euphoric concoction. This leads Charlotte to have sex with the sheep herder in the forest, being seen in this ecstatic state by one of the villagers, and having strange visions of witchcraft ceremonies deep in the woods that may or may not be real.

Themes of modernity clashing with tradition, education clashing with superstition, and female sexual freedom versus the repressed propriety of a traditional, insular village mix together to create a charged atmosphere in Nightsiren. All the while, writer-director Tereza Nvotana grounds the film in a realistic exploration of grief and loss. Charlotte has been traumatized and retraumatized and has a secret that you might assume is supernatural in nature, but it's not. It's all rooted in a series of traumas that are now being used as evidence to prove that she's evil.

Digging deep into the meaning of it all, one could see the deeply suspicious and superstitious glares of the villagers as the voices in Charlotte's head, the deep well of insecurity, fear, and guilt that she's carried her entire life from being a victim of abuse, to the death, real or otherwise of her sister, to a baby lost to a miscarriage and an abusive marriage that occurred before she arrived back in this village, the roiling tensions that Charlotte meets and appears to inflame with her presence, are wildly symbolic of a roiling internal mental health struggle.

That's the symbolism but you can also more simply see the film from a surface perspective of a horror movie about a town of ignorant, backwoods people eager to blame an outsider for their own shortcomings, ignorance, and violence. All of the problems plaguing the village, drunkenness, sexual violence, domestic violence, neglectful parenting, all existed before Charlotte returned home. Before her, these problems were blamed on a witches curse. Charlotte arrives and appears to embody the Witches curse and this makes her a convenient target, a physical apparition that can be vanquished.

This two track storytelling doesn't even include the mysteries embodied by Mira. Who is she? Why is she the only one to be so kind to Charlotte? Why does she seem to know more than she lets on about Charlotte's past and why she was asked to return to this tiny mountain village? I won't spoil anything for you, I highly recommend that you see Nightsiren for yourself to dig into that mystery and Eva Mores' exceptional performance.

Nightsiren is receiving a limited theatrical release on September 22nd.

Screenland Armour - Kansas city

LA - Glendale - Lamelle

Film Noir - New York

There is no word yet when the film may hit streaming rental sites, but I do urge you to keep an eye out for it.

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