Sydney Sweeney stars as Juliet, a gifted musical student whose talent is always overshadowed by her twin sister, Vivian (Madison Iseman). When the student picked to deliver the senior solo at the end of the year recital dies under mysterious circumstances, the school decides to hold auditions to replace her. Violet has a nasty fall and is unable to play the recital, which leaves the door open for Juliet to steal the spotlight. Juliet also finds the dead student’s music book, which is filled with oodles of ominous looking doodles that are possibly some sort of supernatural incantation. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, right?
Nocturne was produced by Blumhouse for Amazon Prime Video, and it’s easy to see why it went straight to streaming as I don’t think anyone would’ve really rushed out to see this in theaters. It’s a slow burn horror movie and it takes its sweet time building up. It’s not bad, nor is it exactly engrossing. It just needed a little more oomph to propel it over the pokey patches. It also doesn’t help that the horror touches are just too subtle to make much of an impression one way or another.
The set-up kind of reminded me a little of The Perfection. It doesn’t have that film’s tension, but it’s similar in that both movies are about how the desire to be a skilled musician leads to horrific things. At least that flick delivered on its slow burn build-up with some sizzle at the end. The same can’t be said for Nocturne.
Overall, this was a bit of a slog. However, since it featured my girl Sydney Sweeney, I was able to stay with it for the most part. She spends most of the movie all buttoned up and prim and proper like, but the way she really gets into her piano playing is sort of hot. She does a good job during her freak-out scenes too, even though the movie never quite gives her a chance to really go for broke. Her fine performance at the very least prevents the film from feeling… ahem... one note.
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