03/07/2023 - Mélanie Delloye delivers a psychological thriller depicting the control and gaslighting tactics which wind their way into the daily life of a young couple isolated in an Irish manor house

Having self-produced her first feature film L’Indivision, French-Belgian director Mélanie Delloye is now returning with a second feature called Nightman [+see also:
interview: Mélanie Delloye
film profile], a genre film exploring gender-based violence which was presented in the National Competition and in a world premiere at the sixth Brussels International Film Festival. This psychological thriller which examines an increasingly toxic relationship between a young woman and her husband unfolds against a backdrop of Irish legends and mist.

It has to be said, our young heroine Alex (brilliantly played by Zara Devlin) is hauling a huge amount of family baggage around with her. "I smiled at my father when he’d just killed my mother", she confesses to her therapist in the opening scene. It’s entirely feasible that this trauma is holding her back on the cusp of adulthood, in a kind of half-sleep state. When she and her older husband (Mark Huberman) decide to move into the latter’s family home on the edge of a forest, which echoes to the sound of hunters’ gunfire, her isolation and sense of being a foreigner in this new land lead her to question herself, but also the man she has married, whose behaviour seems to be taking a bit of a turn, now that he’s faced with the ghosts of his past.

As the mist smothers the landscape, Alex discovers the legend of the Banshee, a supernatural female creature from Irish Celtic mythology, which seems to resonate with the high number of dead women in Alex’s life, namely her mother and sister-in-law. The tension ramps up a notch when Damian starts to experience sleepwalking crises, where he seems to be fighting mysterious enemies carrying evil inside of them.

It’s true that we’ve seen plenty of young women suffering at the hands of a sadist, running through the woods, wrestling without all kinds of dangerous situations. But beneath its surface as a genre film sustained by Irish folklore, and its conflict between vegetarian townspeople and meat-eating rural folk, which all seems to lead towards a final exorcism from which no-one will escape unharmed, Nightman works to depict a complex variant of marital control through the fiction form. Gaslighting is a psychological form of manipulation where the victim is led to doubt what she’s seen, heard, believed, and even what she thinks, by reinforcing lies or by blaming a situation on the victim’s flaw, in this instance Alex’s status as an alcoholic, even though she no longer drinks. The film also encourages us to question how our societies treat children who go off track, and the consequences these occasionally experimental treatments can actually have. Fighting fire with fire doesn’t always seem to be the best path.

Nightman is the second work, after Grégory Beghin’s Deep Fear, in a quadrilogy jointly developed by Belgian firms Entre chien et loup and Black Swan Tales (the latter created by the French group Mediawan), a set of 4 feature-length genre films which are artistically independent but all produced along the same model. It’s a system tested and approved in the USA, inspired by the endeavours of Blumhouse which engendered the hit movie Get Out.

(Translated from French)