Nightsiren

This is a canny, emotionally impactful film that shows just how powerful folk horror can be as a tool to address urgent aspects of the present day.

Nightsiren is a bewitching film that will hopefully work its magic on countless horror audiences to come.

This sober, sombre film is always a visual treat with a formidable atmosphere and lots of interesting layering to unpick&#59; if only, if only a few more loose ends were tied up.

What's different about Nightsiren is how the cries of "witch," the public excoriations and publicly-sanctioned mortifications, happen in the present--in the wilds of a modern Slovakia...

Nightsiren never wants viewers to be completely comfortable, frequently presenting challenging scenes and ideas. Despite that discomfort, the story within is a gripping one that feels bigger than the narrative mysteries it details.

Nvotová is well versed in the language of the horror film, and some scenes echo the early work of Neil Jordan, but go much further in their hallucinatory concatenation of the forest wild and the monstrous feminine.

A ferocious tale that manipulates familiar tropes into a personal, and culturally specific, vision.

Set within the gorgeous country and woodlands of Slovakia, Nightsiren channels many modern folk horrors, extrapolating their essence and wrapping them into an overtly feminine and queer narrative.

Nvotová and co-writer Barbora Namerova smartly deploy the witchy elements in this slow-burn chiller to explore themes of violence and misogyny.

a film less about female malefactors than about the villagers’ partriarchal structures and deep-seated misogynies (some internalised by the local women themselves) which suppress difference and readily blame innocent women.