Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nocturne’ on Amazon Prime, a Blumhouse Treat About Young Women and the Devil’s Music

Nocturne is the fourth and final film in Amazon Prime’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collection, and — review spoiler alert! — it’s the best of the bunch. By far, actually. First-time director Zu Quirke penned a screenplay about fraternal twin sister pianists attending a boarding school for gifted musicians, although some are inevitably more gifted than others, and others are more prone to mysterious occult influences — or, to maybe be more accurate, anxieties possibly metaphorically represented by mysterious occult influences — than some. Anyway. It’s a good one. Here’s why.

NOCTURNE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An eerie choir soprano-moans as the camera crawls down a long blue hallway lined with old portrait paintings. A young woman plays the violin with masterful grace. A yellow light fills the room. She climbs to the ledge and leaps off, fully cementing herself in Linberg lore. Cut to: old home movies of twin girls playing the piano together. They’re now seniors at Linberg, a prestigious art school. Juliet (Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria) is quiet, withdrawn, hardworking, on anxiety meds and amazing at piano. Vivian (Madison Iseman) is outgoing, cheerful, has a boyfriend and even more amazing at piano. They return to the dorms not too long after the girl cruelly dubbed “Mad Moira” committed suicide on campus. Vivian has a Julliard scholarship in her future, and Juliet will be taking a “gap year,” having come in second in a two-woman competition.

Juliet is known as Jules and Vivian goes by Vi, which is the Roman numeral VI, and if you add two more of those, you get sssssssssssssSATAN. Stay with me here. Jules’ piano tutor is a pretentious drunkard. Vi’s is a taskmaster, but the best at the school. They’re prepping for a competition to be featured soloist at the big recital, and Jules’ long-simmering resentment is starting to show a few boiling bubbles. Jules comes across Moira’s notebook, which is filled with Necronomicon shit — creepy drawings, strange symbols, backwards script and a musical piece known as “The Devil’s Trill.” The drawings are numbered I-V and the page for VI is torn out. Uh oh.

The day of the competition, Jules wakes up to find her pants and sheets stained with menstrual blood that’s roughly the shade of Argento red. Vi walks in and her first instinct is to laugh at her “wombie” — but then she helps her clean up. Jules sees three circles in the hand of one of the demonic figures in Moira’s notebook, so instead of taking one pill today, she pops three. Vi doesn’t know that Jules secretly planned to play the same piece for the competition, so when Jules parks herself meekly on the bench and begins, it’s a call to arms. Understandable, Vi gets hot. In the middle of the performance, Jules suddenly sees the blue hallway from the beginning of the movie except it’s red, and there’s that yellow light again and she walks down the hall into a room and opens a door and sees what she always wanted, herself on a stage being adored by the crowd, so she’s outside of herself, and when she sees herself, herself looks at herself and everything from here on out gets really quite strange.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s Whiplash meets the original Suspiria with the creepy sequences from The Neon Demon tossed in for good measure.

Performance Worth Watching: Playing the lesser twin with a complex, Sweeney shoulders the significant psychodramatic burden of Nocturne. Jules is a good pianist, absolutely, but Sweeney tantalizingly keeps wondering if everyone is underestimating her, or if she’s overestimating herself.

Memorable Dialogue: Vi’s personal tutor compares her to Moira: “Vivian plays like the devil’s at the door. Moira played like the devil’s in the room.”

Sex and Skin: One weird NNSS (non-nude sex scene) is demonic and sexy, and possibly demonically sexy?

Our Take: Quirke writes and directs the hell out of Nocturne. It’s stylish, atmospheric, a little bit diabolical in the way it teases us without explaining the whys and wherefores of what’s going on, and lets the story be more than just another silly oh-no-she’s-possessed Pazuzu piece. Quirke leaves plenty of room for thematic ruminations on desire, blood rivalry, stress and the inner competitiveness that drives some to madness, and sets it in a school that’s rotting from the inside — where men tell girls if they’re any good at mastering a slowly dying art form. Sweeney is terrific as a young woman coming of age, weary of being passive; perhaps it’s through blood and Satan that mean girls are born? I wonder.

Quirke’s influences are sometimes conspicuous, but they’re the right ones — Refn and Argento mostly, with slivers of Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), de Palma, maybe even Kubrick (because few can crawl down a hallway like Kubrick). It’s a confident thriller that’s never beholden to typical horror-movie twists, and doles out sweaty-tense moments and eye-widening imagery with exquisite timing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nocturne isn’t just the best of the new Blumhouse batch, it’s one of the strongest horror movies of the year.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Nocturne on Amazon Prime