She Came At Night – 28th Made in Prague Festival

Writers and Directors: Tomás Pavlícek and Jan Vejnar

Featured as part of the 28^th Made in Prague Festival 2024, She Came At Night, directed and written by Tomás Pavlícek and Jan Vejnar, is billed as a dark comedy. A gentle young couple, Jirka and Aneta, are without warning, landed with Jirka’s mother. She arrives one night with a vast yellow suitcase, having apparently bailed on a holiday in Malta. She makes an emotional appeal to be allowed to stay just one night. With a sinking heart, you realise exactly where this is going to go. Sure enough Valerie, the mother in question, is a woman from hell, determined to wreak havoc on the young couple who, it seems, will never be able to get rid of her.

Valerie is everyone’s idea of a monstrous mother-in-law, if we’re still allowed to invoke this old trope. We’ve been forewarned by a short comic scene in a park, where an innocent bystander is asked by a demanding woman to take first one, then endless photos of herself posing with her family. This is not Valerie. Valerie, when she turns up is a thousand times more annoying. She talks constantly, she sings, she finds numerous ways to be noisy and she is highly manipulative

Pavlícek and Vejnar have clearly had great fun brainstorming ever more over-the-top ways in which Valerie can behave. She starts by taking over the cooking – unrequested. She rearranges the kitchen, while leaving the place in a mess. She hoovers early in the morning, or takes a long bath so that Aneta is forced to shower in front of her before she can get to work.

It gets worse. She begins prying into their relationship, asking ludicrously intrusive questions about their sex life and proferring unsought advice. She bursts into their bedroom late at night, claiming she needs to deliver Jirka’s ironed shirts.

Your ability to find all this funny depends upon your tolerance for endless iterations of a single trope. Viewers of a less tolerant disposition may not be able to reach the half-hour mark without yelling at the screen, demanding spineless Jirka get a grip and chuck his mother out. Aneta not only has to deal with this total invasion of her shared home, but as a physiotherapist, has to deal with elderly men at work who are similarly without boundaries. It’s hard not to feel that Pavlícek and Vejnar don’t have a lot of time for older people.

There’s a temporary respite when Valerie decides to move out. But then worse is in store. The couple, now so battered by the experience they can hardly communicate any more, come home from a walk to find Valerie has returned and installed a dreadful old rogue of an alcoholic man friend, who insists on being called Tomcat. He’s here to stay, he informs them.

Simona Peková gives a kind of enthralling awfulness to Valerie but the parts for Jirí Rendl as Jirka and Annette Nesvadbova as Aneta are so undeveloped there is little chance of any real comic development. The cinematography by Simon Dvoracek is appealing.

She Came at Night, which premiered at the 2023 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, won a bunch of awards including Best Director, Best Actress, Best Film, and the Czech Lion Award. It’s hard to see why. Maybe something gets lost in translation.

She Came at Night is screening at the 28th Made in Prague Festival from 31 October to 30 November.