Derived from its short-form predecessor, ‘The Jester’ horror story gets its feature length treatment as it tells the story of a malevolent being that terrorizes a small town during Halloween. Following two sisters, Emma (Lelia Symington) and Jocelyn (Delaney White), the Jester torments the half-siblings shortly after the passing of their father.
The film opens on John (Matt Servitto) as he calls on Emma to try to reconnect with his estrange daughter. Dismissive of his attempt to try to start a dialogue with her, John succumbs to the Jester, a seemingly supernatural entity that toys with and eventually kills him.
At John’s funeral, a dismayed and conflicted Emma goes to the service. Jocelyn, John’s daughter from a subsequent marriage, sees Emma and invites her to meet with her later. After the service, Emma sees the Jester dancing on John’s grave. Losing sight of the man, Emma dismisses having seen him.
On meeting with Jocelyn, Emma opens up and tries to connect with her half-sister. Further discussion leads Emma to admit that she feels anger and betrayal towards John as he abandoned her and her mother to start a new life and family elsewhere. The strength of the film lies here as Symington and White try to reconcile their father’s past and accept that he was his own person, whilst at the same time making peace with the damage that his actions had caused either one of them.
Thereafter, the film focuses in on the malicious misdeeds of the titular character. Perhaps unwittingly, the brutality of the evil entity’s kills play off well for laughs, providing for entertaining, if not horrifying, murder sequences.
After ambushing Jocelyn at the town’s Halloween festival, the Jester lures Emma to a secluded place and forces her to face her innermost fears. The suppressed anger Emma feels is outweighed by her feelings of inferiority as the Jester makes her believe her father had though of her as a burden. Accidentally stabbing Jocelyn whilst under the Jesters spell, Emma confronts the entity to let him know she’ll face her suppressed feelings and that she is not afraid of him.
The final shot of the film shows Emma visiting John’s grave, expressing that she is working through the emotional baggage that his actions had left her with. Surprisingly, the Jester is shown right alongside her, revealing the entity to be a hereditary, almost disease like, trait, forcing the woman to live with the shadow of the being cast over her.
The successful aspects of the feature lie with the relationship and torment of the two sisters. With sparse use of the emotionally weighty material and a seeming over-abundance of the Jester fooling round, the film lacks substance. Where it could have made use of the darker side of Emma and Jocelyn’s innermost dark thoughts, the feature veers towards the slightly more ridiculous, delivering a project that feels like a missed opportunity and wasted potential in terms of exploring how dark the Jester really could have been.
Score: 1/4
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