88 min | PG-13 | February 26, 2021 | IFC Midnight
A lapsed Hasidic man takes a one-night job watching over a dead body. The corpse comes with a passenger. He should have stayed in his support group.
Yakov Ronen has left the Hasidic community in Brooklyn. He attends a support group for others who have done the same. He cannot afford his medication. So when his former rabbi offers him cash to sit a few hours as a shomer, the religious watchman who guards a corpse until burial, he takes it. The film is a haunted-house thriller built inside one apartment over one night, but its real subject is grief that calcifies into something with teeth. Yakov is haunted before the supernatural arrives, and the movie understands that the demon is just a delivery system for the trauma he refuses to face.
Dave Davis carries the film almost alone. He plays Yakov as a man permanently braced for impact, shoulders hunched, eyes scanning corners that are still empty. Davis lets the panic build in increments rather than bursts, so the dread feels earned by the time the apartment turns against him. Lynn Cohen plays Mrs. Litvak, the dead man’s widow, as a figure who drifts between frailty and threat without ever announcing which she is. Menashe Lustig brings a brief warmth as Reb Shulem, the rabbi whose kindness is also a transaction, and the contrast sharpens how alone Yakov truly is.
Keith Thomas writes and directs his first feature and roots the horror in the specific texture of Hasidic ritual rather than generic spookhouse mechanics. He shoots most of the film in a cramped apartment lit by phone screens and candle flame, and he uses Yakov’s phone as both a lifeline and a weapon. A video call replays itself in distorted loops, turning the camera roll into a haunted object. The sound design layers Yiddish whispers under low drones so the language itself becomes a source of menace. The back half trades some of that patience for staged jump scares, and the seams show when the dread converts into mechanism.
What holds is the conviction that the monster is metaphor made literal. The Mazzik feeds on guilt, and Yakov has more than enough to sustain it. Thomas keeps the scares tethered to a real wound, which is why the quiet stretches land harder than the loud ones. The film never fully escapes the genre furniture it leans on, but it commits to its world and its grieving man, and that commitment is enough to make the night feel haunted rather than merely loud.