In short: Nocturne (2016)

Obviously running away from something or someone she’d rather not face this night, Jo (Clare Niederpruem) goes to a small graduation party of people she isn’t exactly friends with (as played by Hailey Nebeker, Melanie Stone, Darien Willardson, Colton Tran, and Jake Stormoen). There are various strains of dysfunction among and between these people - suggestions of rather typical young adult problems from eating disorders to jealousy and general prickishness abound. But instead of just getting drunk, or stoned, and sleeping with the wrong people for the wrong reasons, our protagonists decide to pretend they’ve never seen a horror movie and hold a séance. Of course, what starts out as a game becomes rather disturbing when the entity they are talking to demonstrates a bit too much detailed knowledge of everyone’s darker secrets as well as a nasty streak. The thing frightens them so much, they do the big no-no in movie séances (as well as in polite society) and break it off without saying goodbye to the entity.

During the course of the night, everyone’s problems and secret sins come to the surface; people begin acting only on their worst impulses in ways that can only lead to pain for everyone involved. But that’s before the really bad stuff begins to happen, from the old standby of demonic possession to various pretty horrible deaths.

I didn’t go into Stephen Shimek’s indie horror Nocturne expecting much of it at all. There are, after all, countless films about séances gone wrong right now, most of them not worth the time watching them, and adding US style demons like they are  en vogue right now to the mix usually makes a film even less interesting. After all, how often can you watch some possessed girl float in the corner of some ceiling while sprouting bad theology before you become bored by it? I have certainly reached that point of saturation a year or two ago.

However, Nocturne is rather more interesting than the set-up or the demons suggest. It starts with a group of characters that seem much more convincing young adults than typical for this sort of production, with problems that ring truer than usual and whose escalation through the supernatural is effectively horrifying because it cuts to what feels like actual bone. For once, the more psychological aspects of the demonic activity here seem actually insidious because it’s not going through the demonic playbook but actually preying on the weaknesses of the characters. Weaknesses the script and some more than decent performances by the group of young actors have prepared well.

Once things turn physical, Shimek shows a fine macabre imagination that keeps the connections between the demise of the characters and their weaknesses open without going too far in the direction of ironic deaths. These deaths, the audience is supposed to feel, so ironic distance would be fatal for the film’s effect.


Speaking of effects, the film’s practical effects are more than decent too, never becoming the sole point of the film yet also keeping the proper unflinching pose. As an added bonus for friends of the Weird like me, Nocturne also features some rather cool parts where it plays with the nature of space and time, as well as that most rare of things – a twist ending that is actually an organic part of the film that came before.