Use of Tropes: Lullaby

Or, should I say, the use of a single trope and the trope in this 2022 release, directed by John R. Leonetti, is the use of the figure of Lilith (Kira Guloien). However, despite the entwinement of Lilith into the vampire genre, this film does not touch on the vampiric aspects, though it rightly sets itself within a Jewish community.

After an opening with parent Vivian (Liane Balaban) and her husband desperately breaking mirrors in their home as their infant son Zachary is stalked (in his cot) by Lilim. These are Lilith's demon children and are drawn in cgi as twisted infants (one twin-headed another half wolf, for instance). One scratches Zachary’s cheek, a mirror explodes outwards killing dad and Vivian finds an infant-corpse in the cot, where her baby should be.

the book

So, to the film proper and we see Rachel (Oona Chaplin) and husband John (Ramón Rodríguez) returning home with their new-born son Eli. We later discover that John has converted to Judaism for his wife. As they get home a box is delivered, from Rachel’s mother, containing baby things that belonged to Vivien (Rachel’s sister), who now resides in a psych-hospital (the authorities think that the golem baby in the cot was Zachary who had been dead for a fortnight). In the box is an old-looking illustrated book in Hebrew. It is John who starts to translate some of the script, learning Hebrew as he is (though the Hebrew used in the book is not a modern variant).

Lilim

The film cuts forward and Eli is a bit of a crier. Ma and Pa are getting little sleep, Rachel’s career is on hold and she feels like she’s going nuts. She happens to come across the book again and there is music for a lullaby in it, along with John’s translation. She sings it, Eli calms but the lullaby is a trap. Lilith used the song that Adam sang for her to construct it and allow her to be summoned into our world (as part of a larger ritual). The lullaby allows the Lilim and her crone servant (Mary Ann Stevens) to haunt the parents and get the ritual finished.

the crone

The couple start seeing things (often the crone) and we get lots of jump-scare friendly happenings (such as the electrics blowing). They investigate in their own ways. She goes to Vivian, he goes to synagogue and speaks to the Rabbi (Julie Khaner) who tells him the folkloric aspect of this, not actually believing but, as she remembers Vivien reporting similar, gets him in touch with Rabbi Cohen (Alex Karzis, Lost Girl, the Strain & What We Do in the Shadows). Cohen is a Rabbi with a mystical leaning – a Shomrim patroller calls him the Dybbuk Man (though there is no further reference to this).

Kira Guloien as Lilith

Cohen tells him the rest of the ritual, the sacrifice of an unclean animal (John was tricked into killing his pet macaw) and the spilling of the child’s blood, and then gives John the means to fight Lilith. Rachel, on the other hand, ends up actually in Lilith’s realm and it is here that Lilith became a trope used and not a central vampiric figure in the film. Lilith is stealing babies, jealous that the children of Adam and Eve (and their descendants) are perfect, where the Lilim are twisted. However, she is not drinking their blood (or draining energy or eating flesh, for that matter), rather all the babies are swaddled, collected together in a pocket of her realm – taken, frozen in age but alive. The entrance to her realm was full of blackened infant bodies, which didn’t gel with this, but it did seem the thrust of her actions was taking the babies for herself rather than to devour.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK