Pianos at Night

A college student's ambition to be a great pianist are piqued with a little help from demoniac forces in 2020's Nocturne. Sydney Sweeney stars as a pale ascetic. No-one batted an eye at that back in 2020, and she does a fine job. A lot of people compared this movie to The Black Swan--the Natalie Portman ballerina movie, not the Tyrone Power pirate movie--but there's more of a gossipy tone to this movie. It's not bad, though, and writer/director Zu Quirke delivers a solid little horror soap opera.

Juliet (Sweeney) is the sister of Vivian (Madison Iseman). They're both talented pianists at an elite boarding school but Vivian has been accepted to Julliard while Juliet hasn't. Juliet may have been jealous but it's hard to say how much jealousy comes naturally from her and how much of it is provoked by circumstances, which I thought was a nice point of ambiguity.

There's also recently been a suicide, the school's star pianist, and this leaves a slot open for someone else to perform at an important school concert, and it turns out to be Vivian. Meanwhile, Juliet finds a notebook that belonged to the deceased star pianist and it's filled with strange, demoniac images and symbols. There's the notebook, there's the occasional cruel words from Vivian or their mutual friends, there's the fact that Juliet has sacrificed having a personal life since childhood just to be the best. It's hard to say for sure what pushes Juliet into darker territory in her desire to be the best.

I think this movie would count as Dark Academia if all the characters were attractive boys wearing tweed. Sweeney's believable as someone with a hidden tenacious streak who's not as introspective as she ought to be.

Nocturne is available on Amazon Prime.

Sonnet 2012

For puddles drained, forgotten days recede
As gentle hills of sand dissolve, they slept
A dose of twenty grains, do not exceed
There's secret math in rotten lockers kept
A row of blondes beholds the podgy wight
He disappears across the nightly track
And so the ladies board the pumpkin train
The sky above becomes a jelly black
Their station's gone and now they're left alone
They peer about the strange and empty lot
The chill ignores their coats and hits the bone
A distant howl provokes a gloomy thought
The hungry shapes are swirling round them fast
From here, some cruel and bitter spells are cast