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Vigil More at IMDbPro »
| Index | 10 reviews in total |
5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Hauntingly beautiful coming-of-age film, 17 August 1998
Author:
Susan Thrasher from New Zealand
A slow-moving film, exquisitely shot, that to me is the best of pre-1990's New Zealand films. Mystical, magical, haunting, poetic, moody, moving...these words come to mind when trying to describe the film. Best images: Toss in the ballet tutu and gumboots; the unexpected spurt of blood on Toss's face when docking the lambs; Mum at the window; "Beans to God". Applause for script, cinematography, direction, and Fiona's remarkable performance as Toss.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
grand dark feeling of emptiness, 2 October 2010
Author:
Steve Skafte from Nova Scotia, Canada
I grew up in the frames of "Vigil". Not to say that I was born in New
Zealand - rather, I spent my early years in the lonely valleys and
hillsides of Nova Scotia. But this film captures the desperate sense of
isolation, the profound and perfect life buried beneath year after year
of aching dreamtime, heartwaking nights beneath stars, mornings of fog
that weigh you down with the power of all the heavens.
"Vigil" understands childhood. From the confusion of relationships, to
the expression of emotion, the distance of adults, and the impetuosity
and irrationality of youth. The wisdom of the young, held back without
even the slightest consideration for right and wrong. The final answers
to questions like "Why was I born?" and "Why am I me and not someone
else?". The final answers that are really just acceptances. Eternal
questions. For most of my life, since I was the very same age as the
girl depicted in this story, I've been looking for a film that captured
children as they really are, as they really behave, instead of just
some adult's idea of how they act. This catches that elusive sense. For
the first time, it puts me inside the childlike mind, lets me see
through the same eyes that I once had. Unlike so many, I haven't
forgotten what it was like to be this age, what it was really like. No
other film understands childhood with such straight purity as this.
The sight of "Vigil" is like riding in a car with snowy windows. Like
finding yourself in a poorly insulated house as the glass develops ice
crystals and blurs your vision of the outside world. "Vigil" is life
through a glass darkly. Alun Bollinger, the cinematographer, seems to
see beyond the level of possibility. Beyond what naturalistic
photography can conceivably capture. He takes the solid and safe and
turns it deadly. Takes the inanimate and makes it breathe. It's as if
horses were dreams and you find yourself riding nightmares in the
pasture. It's dark and cold, yet full of life and light. Even the
shadows tell of light. For if one is capable of perceiving the beauty
of light, there is no end of it to be found in a film like "Vigil".
If a man like Vincent Ward had an achievement in life, a reason to be
an artist, this film is that. He creates a tale of such perfection,
such breath and personification, that I never realized how desperately
I'd been searching my whole life for it to come around. With his
co-writer, Graeme Tetley, a story of believability and human
understanding has been woven together so tight, so pure, that I can't
even speak of cinematic considerations. I can't think of undue
questions or dissections. The reality is complete. For scene after
scene, a solid image is perfectly presented, composed. Faces, houses, a
derelict car, a jousting match. Nothing is weak. Nothing is
unimportant.
This is the fifth film I've seen by Vincent Ward. One of them (What
Dreams May Come) engaged me, but the visuals kept a distance. Two
others (River Queen and Map of the Human Heart) were held back by
unconvincing performances, though they were engaging otherwise. The
Navigator, which he made four years later, is another truly great film
- though of a much different style. But I'm not thinking of other films
tonight. I'm dreaming of this world, and taking my vigil at the window.
Tonight is calm, and the early Autumn air has settled outside my home
in the Annapolis Valley. I'm thinking of the images I've seen, feeling
changed and refocused, picked up out of my depression. This story has
re-awoken the most desperate parts of my soul. It has left me with, to
quote a song, "that grand dark feeling of emptiness".
For more of this feeling: Days of Heaven (1978), The Black Stallion
(1979), Never Cry Wolf (1983), Tender Mercies (1983), The Stone Boy
(1984), Ironweed (1987)
4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Recently seen the movie, 21 January 2007
Author:
Citizenkenn_1-1 from United States
At the starting scene of the movie, I did not know what to expect..as I
continued to watching..I began to drawn to each character in their own
way in the movie as in the connection between the mother, the
grandfather, the poacher (the stranger).All together in one. But the
real star in the story is TOSS- the little girl who witness her
father's death. Throughout the whole movie, one begin to see how she is
coping by her father's departure and somewhat feel alienated she wore
an hawk-like hat to cover her face from the rest of the world ..and
coming of age to discover who she really is and most of all the value
of her womanhood.
The movie is a bit slow but it has a nice background based on its time,
kinda bluish-gray mixing with different weathers during the scenes
which made it magnificent and captivating to watch..Don't expect drama
or actions..This movie is somewhat for the innocent. Just a feel-good
movie. Go your nearest store; buy or rent it. You will enjoy it..
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
an obscure story, gorgeously rendered, 13 January 2011
Author:
Michael Neumann from United States
A young girl comes of age on a remote New Zealand farm, isolated deep inside a beautiful but forbidding landscape of windswept forests and mountains. Be forewarned: the film is no picturesque fable of adolescent angst, but a brooding, dreamlike story that occasionally slips into eerie, portentous lyricism. Shot in luminous verdant tones, the surrounding terrain is allowed to determine (some might say overwhelm) the scenario, putting it at the mercy of the impassive power of nature. Character and story development are nominal: after her father dies falling off a cliff, the young heroine watches a menacing, mysterious poacher arrive to help her widowed mother and crackpot grandfather, with his unexpected presence adding a subdued current of muted violence and sexuality to the already troubled household. It's a dark, claustrophobic little film, dramatically taciturn but visually impressive.
Certainly not like anything else, 23 April 2012
Author:
showtrmp from United States
I don't know when I've seen a film that was so beautiful and yet so
utterly baffling. It's not like any other movie you'll ever see. Every
single image is stark and brutal--the director, Vincent Ward, is trying
to enter a primitive painting and make drama out of it. And he has a
perfect setting--a sheep farm in New Zealand--that comes from Thomas
Hardy's accounts, in which nature wages an unending, unfathomable
conspiracy against the characters. It's in the actual story Ward tells
that he gets into trouble. His 12-year-old heroine, Toss (Fiona Kay)
witnesses her farmer father's death from an accidental fall (as he
tries to rescue a sheep) and the camera sits on her impassive face for
the first of several eternities. Her restless mother (Penelope Stewart)
seizes the opportunity to put the farm up for sale. Her dotty
grandfather (Bill Kerr) is like every dotty grandfather in the
movies--he putters around, muttering feisty-old-goat aphorisms and
tinkering with whimsical machines--and quickly becomes insufferable.
Ethan, (Frank Whidden) the hunter who carried the father's corpse back
to the farm, shows up again looking to replace the father. Toss and her
mother are both attracted and repelled by him.
In one remarkable sequence, we see Toss experimenting with Ethan's gun.
She looks through the gun sights and begins tracking Ethan through the
house, as if she were ambushing James Bond. When Ethan sees her, he
steps boldly toward her and removes the sight, which she had taken off
the gun and is holding to her eye like a telescope. We are in D.H.
Lawrence sexual-awakening territory now, but the combination of
Lawrence and Hardy doesn't ignite the way it should--the director's
austere manner (keeping everything at a distance) begins to seem remote
and rather obscure. The scenes don't follow from each other; each one
goes off on its own, and the characters shift attitudes and allegiances
to no clear purpose. The performers start doing a lot of staring and
squinting into the camera (for LONG periods) only Stewart makes any
impression, as she's the only one who actually engages with the person
she's speaking to (and the only one who seems to have any grasp on
reality.) The last fourth of the movie is unspeakably depressing. We
finally realize that this is the kind of film where explanations and
logic are left out, and the resultant confusion is presented as
"depth". Fascinating and infuriating, in just about equal measure.
1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
A moody, arresting piece filled with the unexpected., 4 March 2000
Author:
Noel Brown from Chicago IL
Vincent Ward's work in this film reminded me of the use of images by Bergman
in his early films. Rough country, silhouetted figures, unexpected angles
and movement, an avoidance of bright colour.
We have to struggle to get to know the characters a little, and that is what
I found was drawing myself in to the film. Ward could be accused of not
telling the story fully enough. I found that his style kept me wondering
what might happen next.
6 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Everyone has to start somewhere, 16 October 2005
Author:
Jon from United States
Vigil has some good ideas, and occasional moments when they're realized
fairly well, but this is anything but a satisfying movie. There's
virtually no content at all, and it is painfully slow in revealing its
emptiness. None of the characters are compelling, the scenery, is
unremittingly gray and bleak, the mood is as drab as the leaden sky
under which it's filmed.
At this point in time, NZ films were often remarkable only for their
weirdness, and Vigil, although tender and with heart, is not an
exception.
Vigil's greatest value may be as a study in Vincent Ward's development,
which burst open to reveal his wonderful talent in the remarkable gem,
The Navigator, two years later, the first of some first-class movies
from New Zealand, such as The Piano, Whale Rider, and of course, The
Lord of the Rings.
4 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Beautifully rendered, 15 January 2000
Author:
Paul Jackson (paulgjackson@yahoo.com) from Bellevue, Washington, USA
Well this film is hard to categorize, but let's just say it is filled with
gorgeous and wondrous textures and images. The stark scenery is
brilliantly
captured by the camera here.
Classic Vincent Ward palette of delectable images and haunting music. -
Bravo!
1 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
A classic pretentious arty mess., 12 March 2008
Author:
wadechurton from New Zealand
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The main problem with Kiwi movies is that the critics won't review them dispassionately. Go to virtually all the film sites and you'll read that this is some kind of classic. It is in fact a boring art-bullied waste of time. The performance by Fiona Kay is excellent, but she is the only fleshed-out character, and doesn't really behave as a normal person, more an adult's rather twisted vision of what a small girl might do and think. None of the other thinly-sketched characters are in any way sympathetic, the setting is within a singularly depressing sodden-hills landscape, and the screenplay is mean-spirited and unfathomable. Why for instance does the mother spend considerable time sewing a tutu for Toss and then blithely let her go out and play in the filthy, muddy outdoors in it? Why does the mother suddenly take up with a surly poacher who shows disturbingly pedophile designs on her young daughter? Are we supposed to find the differently-sane grandfather and his deranged, self-absorbed prattle somehow endearing? You want art, fine, here's your art. You want a proper movie, avoid 'Vigil' until Bad Movie Night.
3 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Dull, Dull, Dull, 29 July 2005
Author:
myq2 from New Zealand
Perhaps I'm just a cynical, unsophisticated knuckle-dragger and nowhere near as cultured as the film festival crowd, but I absolutely loathed this film. To me it epitomizes what is essentially wrong with the film industry in New Zealand; that being the fact that Kiwi film makers seem hell-bent on making boring movies designed to appeal to less than .000000001% of the population. Occasionally, someone gets it right, and every 8-10 years we'll get something like Sleeping Dogs, Goodbye Pork Pie, Ngati, or Whale Rider. But more often than not the local product ranges in quality from only just watchable to mind-numbingly dull, the latter being the case with Vigil. It's not a badly made film - in fact the acting is first rate, and the photography quite stunning - the major problem is the sheer drudgery of it all. Stunning misty landscapes, rustic sets, quaint old farm buildings, and close-ups of leaky taps do not save this stinker from a storyline that drags slower than a mini towing a b-train. Avoid this film at all costs.
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