“The Golem” (2018)
After a deadly plague, a tight-knit Jewish community finds itself trying to heal and go on with life. A wedding celebration is interrupted by villagers from the nearby Russian village, bearing a dying girl. If the girl dies, they are told, the village will suffer.
She does die. The village, full of peaceful people, cannot effectively deal with the violence stripping away their meager defenses. But Hannah, a woman of the village, has been hiding under the floorboards while the Rabbi teaches the men, and while he suggests prayer to deal with the approaching and increasing violence, Hannah remembers an incident from her childhood, where another rabbi used forbidden Kabbalistic magic to summon an earth spirit…and becomes desperate enough to attempt the same.
And anyone who has watched horror films, or knows the original legends, knows where this is going.
But Yoav and Doron Paz, directors, and Ariel Cohen, script writer, have crafted a welcome addition to the canon. A rare example of what might be called “Jewish Horror”, like Jordan Peele and most other “elevated genre” it takes real pain from an under-explored aspect of history (pogroms?) and finds an emotional thread to twist and weave.
Peaceful people can seek to avoid the moral costs of the warrior mindset, inviting victimization, triggering mortal terror, leading to either extinction or choices far more immoral than simply living in balance: the healer, teacher, or shaman are no more valid than the hunter and fighter. Out of that imbalance comes an action that risks not just the lives of the community, but their very souls.
“The Golem” is not a fast-paced monster mash or hack-a-thon. It doles out its shocks carefully, gradually, playing with your allegiances and assumptions, luring you to relaxation with a grayed palate of dreamlike images, then hitting you with the reality of forbidden decisions. Fear-based actions, by both the Jewish community and the Russians who hate them.
Fear leads to anger, anger to violence. Denial of one’s own instincts leads to corruption of our connection between heaven and Earth. We are lost.
You can write such horror about the denial of any basic human emotion: love, sex, ambition, survival, understanding, communication. Stop that flow, and you get dysfunction and damage…and horror.
“The Golem” isn’t perfect (what is?) but it is a solid piece of genre work, and perhaps more. That deeper level of philosophy makes it WORK. And viewed through the lens of someone who values stories from multiple cultural viewpoints, is eager for new voices…this is good. More than good, it is NECESSARY. To view the world through a single lens is to see only one slice of the human experience, and slide into a belief that that culture is central to creation. Freed from that illusion, we can see that the fears and loves and nightmares and dreams that we have, in all times and places, flow from a single source. That understanding opens the heart even as it chills the spine.
It is what I love about world art, and world cinema. For genre fans, and fans of international cinema, The Golem is worth seeking out. (Amazon Streaming)
Namaste
Steve