The Awakening of Lilith
REFUGE FILMS2021 ended up being a year full of films exploring the nature of grief: be it in low-brow pieces of art like WandaVision, horrors like The Night House, or art-house darlings like Drive My Car. It has never been clearer that loss and death are arguably the two most universal things that every individual experiences on the planet: some later than others, but always just as devastating and deeply touching.
An area of filmmaking that is often forgotten is the world of no-budget filmmaking, where deeply passionate cinephiles do everything in their power to bring to life stories that mean the world to them. This process is not unlike an exorcism, where the writer-director creates a ritual that helps them keep their demons at bay, in the hope of achieving inner peace. In many ways, these are the type of films that are able to inspire up-and-coming directors around the world, thanks to their limited budgets and ingenious solutions around technical shortcomings.
One such filmmaker is Steven Adam Renkovish. He made a name for himself in the 2010s on the no-budget circuit with the spiritual short A Beautiful Silence and the tender experimental documentary 401 Rogers. The Awakening of Lilith was a long time coming, with a painstaking amount of time spent fine-tuning the script and trying to assemble the crew. Renkovish had the clever idea of making a prologue short film, Fugue, to get a better grasp of his characters and the heavy themes of his script, before diving headfirst into a four-year-long process of producing and editing his debut feature.
The Awakening of Lilith is a horror film in the same vein as subdued chillers like Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf or Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. Renkovish takes full advantage of the limited scope to delve deep into the disturbed psyche of Lilith: this young woman has lost touch with reality following the mysterious death of a loved one, and her world starts to unravel as she falls deeper into her own fear and pain. Brittany Renée Smith portrays the protagonist to brilliant effect; her slender figure moves slowly through the still frames, and her face shows all the contradictory emotions one goes through while grieving, she is a true revelation, carrying the whole film on her shoulders.
The script explores a multitude of themes that are at the core of the filmmaker’s body of work, especially that of faith. Cinema, thanks to the union of sounds and visuals, has the power to create a truly unique experience that overloads the senses, and that is exactly what The Awakening of Lilith is: an experience. While there are quite a few dialogue-heavy moments – one early on in particular, where Lilith is confronted by her mother, chillingly played by Mary Miles Kokotek, is an emotional highlight – it is when Renkovish abandons words in favour of atmosphere that this shines, ranging from beautiful moments of ecstasy to terrifying nightmares filled with guilt and unnerving sounds, in a way that borders on the spiritual at times.
It is to be expected that The Awakening of Lilith has a few technical shortcomings – inevitable when working on such a simple production with the bare minimum crew. The focus is not always pulled right, the lighting is occasionally too dim, a couple of moments of dialogue sound slightly muffled, and the colour grade can be uneven between two reverse shots. But this is par for the course when it comes to no-budget cinema, and it is ultimately part of the appeal of films like The Awakening of Lilith: despite these problems, the passion and dedication of everyone involved are clear.
Every single person, from the cinematographer to the actors who worked only for one day, believed in Renkovish’s ambition and need to tell this story of coming to terms with death and depression. The Awakening of Lilith is a powerful piece of cinema because of its simplicity, because it feels like everyone who watches it could – and maybe should – pick up a camera and go tell their own stories that are eating them alive. And this is the type of cinema that matters and that needs to be supported, so that more unique and touching stories can be told with the best means possible.