Nightsiren, a new Slovakian film from director Tereza Nvotová now playing at the Locarno Film Festival, wastes no time. Within seconds we see a young Šarlota both escape her abusive mother’s cabin and accidentally push her younger sister Tamara over a cliff. Tamara’s fall is so sudden, no sound of her hitting the ground or sight of her body. She vanishes at the top of the cliff almost like it was a dream.
We’re thrown into the world of a now adult Šarlota (Natália Germani) returning to her picturesque mountain village. She’s received a letter from the mayor to come settle her mother’s estate. The film quickly populates the town with characters, both friendly and antagonistic, who assumed she had disappeared or died as a child. A stare from a one-armed man, a shepherd gently dozing in a field, a young herbalist Mira (Eva Mores) who doesn’t seem afraid of Šarlota or of being herself. Nvotová skillfully uses brief quiet moments to let us know exactly who these people are. The child actors in the movie are amazing too, always adding something to their scenes in just a few seconds of screentime.
Šarlota’s mother’s cabin has burned down. She sleeps in the long empty cabin of Otyla, a Roma woman falsely blamed for the disappearance of Šarlota and her sister and stoned to death. The townsfolk still whisper that Otyla curses the woods. It’s another instance of a Roma person used as backstory for a horror film, but the movie does try to do right by the character.
At this point, the movie completely hooks you with the mystery of what happened to Šarlota’s sister. We see the younger sister falling off the cliff again, this time with a scream and a body on the ground. Šarlota carries scars with her, physical as well as mental. She’s had a recent miscarriage and has an obsessive condition that manifests physically. That physical manifestation gets revealed amidst the lush greenery of the forest.
As Šarlota grows closer with Mira the free-spirited herbalist and her gentle shepherd love interest (Noel Czucor), the rest of the superstitious town begin to suspect she’s responsible for a sick goat and a goose turning into frogs. As they turn on her, they reveal more and more of their repressive nature. One character’s brief joyous embrace of who they are quickly leads to their downfall. They would never have been allowed to keep that moment of joy.
Nvotová does well to keep piling on intriguing details. But as great as the film did to effortlessly set up all the pieces, it tells us the solution to the mystery a little too efficiently. What happened to the sister, the mother’s fate and how the cabin burned down all get solved in a slightly deflating matter of seconds. Even the question of who actually sent the inheritance letter gets solved by a character just leaving a pile of papers out on their couch. It all makes way for a satisfyingly tense conclusion but the revelations could have been allowed to breathe a bit more.
Throughout though, the film manages to be tense, moody and beautiful without ever feeling slow. And it balances its moments of darkness with moments of joy. The movie invites you to laugh at an Easter tradition where men and male children soak the women of the town with water. Kids spray their moms with water guns and adult men dump entire water bottles down women’s backs. It seems fun but is this type of tradition just a cover to help dismiss the town’s rampant domestic and sexual violence?
The misogyny here also punishes women for expressing their sexual desire. In an interview before the film’s production started Nvotová stated “Even though women are no longer being burned at the stake, we are still demonised, for our sexual agency, emotionality, reproductive rights and choices… Only the label has been changed from ‘witch’ to ‘slut’.” The film starkly contrast the scenes of sexual agency and sexual assault, and what the audience is allowed and not allowed to see in these contexts.
Nightsiren succeeds on almost every level. It comes up against the classic horror tropes of sexual purity and mystical minority groups and fights back to varying degrees to give us something different.