Camera:
Šimon DvořáčekMuziek:
Aid KidActeurs:
Simona Peková, Jiří Rendl, Annette Nesvadbová, Vladimír Kratina, Judit Pecháček, Jan Vondráček, Vasil Fridrich, Denisa Barešová, Michal KernSamenvattingen(1)
Jirka and Aneta are a young couple who enjoy the routine of their quiet relationship and are in no hurry to make big decisions in life. One night in their inherited flat, the doorbell rings and standing at the door is Jirka’s mother Valerie. An initially brief visit turns into a never-ending stay by an intense and caustic diva whose presence fundamentally disrupts the couple’s privacy. Certainties are shaken, boundaries broken. Although the film’s directorial duo works with a familiar premise, they subvert any dark humor with a sense of tension more commonly found in horror movies, all of it wrapped in the penetrating question: Is the mother’s unbearable smothering legitimate or are mothers sometimes the biggest monsters of all? (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)
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Recensie (10)
The mother-in-law is bitter, even if she were made of sugar. A cheaply and quickly made social and intergenerational statement. A horror in the sense of an invasion of personal space by burglars and energy vampires, where everyone is a victim and even the seemingly unclear are antagonists. What if the antagonist was also the one who, caught between two millstones or generally facing any problem, refuses to resist because it's easier to whine? There are toys on the floor, but they're smashed. Crocs, mustard, and a plastic bag from the grocery store...
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Someone from the creators must have experienced this because it can't be invented. I say this as someone who has had a similar experience as the pair of protagonists. It's a perfect synthesis of meticulous screenwriting, confident direction, and precise casting. The trailers and media coverage during the premiere (and after the Czech Lion awards) actually hint at a horror parody, but when Valérie appears on the scene, I felt physically ill after ten minutes because Jan Vejnar and Tomáš Pavlíček embarked on a character study that is chillingly accurate. It's a pity about the dragged-out ending and the finale that fizzled out.
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A Czech unconventional black-humor home invasion. The film is strange in that the genre classification of horror is a misnomer, but what the main characters experience could be called horror, because it’s something you just wouldn’t like to go through. The star is Simona Pekova, she does a very good job. There is a kind of light psychological terror that carries through the whole film and to my surprise I quite enjoyed it. Fucking squaters! The finale could have been handled better, unfortunately no satisfaction comes in the end.
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Hell is other people. And that’s all the more true in the case of your own family, because you can never escape from it, which is also due to the fact that you carry your family inside yourself forever. Jan Vejnar and Tomáš Pavlíček have made a brilliant home-invasion horror movie in which the terrifying (and suffocating) substance of familial relationships takes the place of the usual genre elements. The reactions in the cinema, filled with heavy, painful sighs, sheer terror and desperate laughter of those longing in vain for relief, provide confirmation of how the filmmakers brilliantly captured the details of psychological terror not only of the maternal variety, but also of the general variety extending one way across the chasm between the generations. Their film’s power lies in the devastatingly accurate casting, which fills out the screenplay based on internally observed and analysed feelings and their triggers, which are embedded in the screenplay with frightening precision and devastating authenticity, whether that involves lobotomising solicitude, crushing egocentricity or merely the exhausting, overly clever wisdom of the elderly. She Came at Night also excels in how it manages to acutely thematise the core of its genre, i.e. the home itself, from the perspective of its importance for the central characters, as well as with respect to how its violation impacts the characters. Of all the elements that the filmmaking duo put into their work, the most terrifying is the fact that they don’t demonise the central monster, but rather point out that each of us has the potential to become such a monster. The fact that the monster is not capable of self-reflection and, because of that, sees herself as a misunderstood victim gives She Came at Night an additional chillingly meaningful level that goes beyond the boundaries of the microcosm of one family, revealing an unsettling general truth about the core of numerous problems in society.
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She Came at Night is a black comedy that transposes family and relationship experiences into an almost horror film based on the simple anecdotal premise of your mother-in-law coming for a visit, and the joke and the surprise work perfectly. Most likely the most interesting and entertaining Czech film of the year. [KVIFF 2023]
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