90 min | NR | October 13, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A driven music student finds a notebook that belonged to a dead classmate, and her piano playing starts to improve overnight. The price is her sister, her sanity, and maybe her soul. Talent this sudden always comes with a bill.
Juliet Lowe is the weaker twin at an elite performing arts academy. Her sister Vivian is the prodigy, the one the faculty fawns over and the conservatories court. Juliet finds a notebook belonging to a student who jumped from a balcony, and the symbols inside it seem to unlock the ability she has always lacked. Zu Quirke builds the film around a Faustian bargain dressed in the uniform of music-school competition. The real subject is the way ambition rots a person from the inside when the gap between desire and ability refuses to close.
Sydney Sweeney plays Juliet as a coil of resentment that tightens with every scene. She tracks the character from meek understudy to someone willing to step over a body, and she never asks the audience to like her. Madison Iseman plays Vivian with an easy confidence that reads as cruelty to a sister who has none of it. Jacques Colimon plays Max, the boyfriend who becomes a prize the sisters fight over, and the triangle exposes Juliet’s hunger more than any supernatural omen does. Ivan Shaw plays Dr. Cask, the instructor whose approval Juliet treats as oxygen.
Quirke writes and directs her first feature with a clear thesis and a thin tool kit. The cinematography leans on hot orange light and lens flares that bloom across Juliet’s visions, a visual signature that signals her unraveling before the script does. The score weaponizes the Saint-Saens piano repertoire the students perform, letting the diegetic music carry the dread instead of a horror sting. The editing intercuts rehearsal and hallucination until the seams stop mattering. The craft is competent and the imagery is too restrained to deliver the pulp the premise promises.
Nocturne wants to be a character study about envy and a horror film about a cursed object at the same time. It commits to the first and only flirts with the second. The Faustian machinery is borrowed and predictable, and the film never decides whether the notebook is real or whether Juliet is simply a young woman who would do anything to be first. That ambiguity is the most interesting thing here, and Quirke has the restraint to leave it open even when the genre keeps demanding she close it.