Jakob’s Wife (2021) Eternally left-turning Modern Vampire Movie (Review)

Acorn Media’s new Blu-Ray of Jakob’s Wife is their latest physical media release of a title that premiered on the streaming service Shudder, a platform which is probably too new to generalise about but I’m a critic and I’m at a loose end, so here we go. One way of interpreting Shudder is that it offers horror fans comfort food, a series of new movies made in a genre they like, featuring people they recognise, frequently made in a warmly retro style. This is a fair description of some of the streaming service’s movies and shows. But it also carries plenty of material that aims to analyse and deconstruct the genre, most obviously in documentaries like Horror Noire and Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, but also in feature films like Revenge and Violation that aim to complicate the tropes they depict.

Without wishing to cast doubt on the wisdom of releasing this film as a standalone disc, Shudder proves to be the perfect platform for Jakob’s Wife, a film which is constantly wrong-footing you about how much of a traditional genre exercise it’s going to be. On one level, it’s a horror film, produced by and starring Barbara Crampton, who’s been an icon of the genre ever since Re-Animator. The rest of the cast is similarly credentialed, with writer and director Larry Fessenden (Wendigo) as the titular Jakob and a monster played by Bonnie Aarons, who has essayed similar make-up-intensive roles in The Conjuring and The Nun (although her scariest screen appearance is in the technically non-horror Mulholland Drive).

And yet something else is going on. The current cycle of redemptive monster movies – Let the Right One In, The Shape of Water, etc. – isn’t new by any means; horror’s history of sympathising with the other stretches back at least as far as Mary Shelley. But there are unquestionably a lot of them being made right now, enough for the audience to be familiar with their narrative contours. Crampton’s Anne is set up as a meek, unsatisfied preacher’s wife, and when she’s bitten by a vampire we’re primed to see this as being a liberation rather than a curse.

There is a lot of amusing material in the early stretches of the film – I was particularly fond of the scene which explains why vampires need to be careful when visiting the dentist, which might just be a genre first. But it’s not quite a comedy, and the depiction of vampirism always keeps one foot in straight-faced horror territory. We’re first alerted to the presence of the undead by a plague of rats, harking back to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu even before the very similarly made-up Aarons makes her first appearance. (Given that Jakob’s Wife transplants Nosferatu-derived imagery into small-town America, Salem’s Lot might also be a touchstone) There’s also a good supporting performance from Nyisha Bell, who tears into the role of a truly nasty vampire that we can measure the conflicted Anne against.

Most of all, there is Larry Fessenden as Jakob, whose relationship with Anne is probably the backbone of the film. The concept of a preacher’s wife becoming a vampire might seem to be ripe for religion-baiting satire, but director and co-writer Travis Stevens keeps a lid on this. Possibly this is because it’s hard to present religion as irrational in the context of a vampire narrative, a situation where having access to holy water is quite a pragmatic step. Equally, though, it’s probably because Fessenden and Crampton are a couple it’s hard not to root for. Jakob has his flaws, as well as a certain conservative streak, but the film treats that as something which can be corrected, not something he needs punishing for exactly.

Having detailed all the things Jakob’s Wife avoids being, you might wonder whether the end result has anything left to actually be. It’s a fair question. Even with all these genre smarts, it ends up on the more comfortingly trad end of Shudder’s output, and its visual style is glossy without being terribly distinctive. But it’s paced well, Stevens is not above going for a pleasingly gratuitous close-up of a ripped-out throat, and Crampton – who also produced – is wonderfully impassioned. Extras are deleted scenes and a making-of doc.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – JAKOB’S WIFE (2021)