The Nightshifter is a 2018 Brazilian horror film about a morgue night shift worker who has an occult gift to speak to the dead and ends up acting upon the knowledge from the dead.
Talking to the dead and messing with the paranormal is not exactly a novel idea in movies. However, The Nightshifter takes its audience to the Brazilian landscape where the audience gets to see it’s unique society and a bit of the unrest. The opening scene with police radios and societal trouble in a city filled with violence and crime makes it quite an effective way to make it feel immersive as it leads to a victim being taken to the morgue where Stenio (Daniel de Oliveira), the main character of director Dennison Ramalho‘s latest The Nightshifter makes his entrance. Based on a short story, The Nightshifter highlights some Brazilian societal issues from its patriarchal traditions, including a male arrogance to the bigger picture of violence and crime in the big city.
The Nightshifter is best with its immersive sound design, creating atmosphere and popping those accents with several jump scare moments. The deliberate loud noises and creepy – albeit at times, cliche sounds effects like doors creaking open or slamming shut, to mysterious knocks – all were timed well and merge nicely to make give it some impact. It’s all about execution at the right time and for the most part, The Nightshifter lives up to the task. However, a part of this also was its downfall as the middle dragged, feeling a little bit repetitive with a few effective jump scares that somehow felt like going through the motions of a horror film while skipping substance. It short, a little predictable.
Aside from those little setbacks, this Brazilian horror film is quite the indie gem. It knows how to escalate the tension in a charming way. Visually, there’s some good moments. In the first half, it relies heavily on gruesome work at the morgue, while in the second, it relies more on creating creepy atmosphere where guts and gore rule the roost. Seriously, it’s all over the place with close-ups and overhead shots. As good as that can be, there’s odd choice at play with the heavy use of CGI for animating the talking dead, which looks rather goofy but sort of adds some dark humor in the beginning that eventually builds to become some rather bone-chilling transformations by the end.
It’s things like this that best give example of why the story itself escalates nicely bit-by-bit. Stenio’s life and decisions start off in an easygoing fashion, having conversations with the dead until he learns a secret from his own personal life that causes him to use knowledge from these back and forths to act upon it with some horrifying consequences. The best part is that these consequences also build as the haunting moments start light and then ascend to an intense final act. The finale’s effectiveness relies on our close attention but boasts some great performances by Bianca Comparato as Lara, Fabiula Nascimento as Odete, as well as de Oliveira as Stenio.
From the sound design to the cinematography and general execution, even if there were some slight pacing issues in the middle act, this long-awaited debut feature film from seasoned director Ramalho. There are genuinely bone-chilling creepy moments in The Nightshifter, which, it is suggested, could be leading to a future TV series. That sort of makes sense considering it’s head-scratcher ending. Despite the small missteps here and there, this is nonetheless a worthy foreign film to check out.