PROVODNIK (SOUL CONDUCTOR).

This blood-and-thunder paranormal thriller provides a showcase for Russia’s new poster girl.

Katya may look like any ordinary city gal but she has a very busy life. She is an empath who consorts with the dead and becomes plagued by ominous visions. She is still dealing with the trauma of her parent’s death by car crash when she was a child. She gets drawn to a spooky mansion where she once witnessed a demonic rite play out. Her dead twin sister returns to her to warn her that her own killer – a serial killer – is still on the loose. Turning to the police for help she finds they fail to believe her. Well, would you?

Provodnik – the title just means `conductor` but is translated into Soul Conductor in English promotions – is a 16+ certificate hour and a half long blend of Dark Fantasy and Psycho-thriller. From `the Russian offices of Twentieth Century Fox` (whatever that means), the film was overseen by 48-year-old Ilya Markov who has a background in television, as do the writing duo of Anna Kurbatova and Alexandr Torpuria.

Evgeny Tsyganov (Peter FM) plays the weary criminal investigator with conviction but the camera’s gaze is forever set on one Alexandra Nikolaevna Bortich. With her cornfield coloured hair, ice blue eyes and catwalk friendly physique, Bortich functions as a `Russian rose` (in fact she hails from the Gomel region of Belorussia).The woman of the moment, she looks out from the front covers of women’s magazines and is playing the lead in a TV show in Russia called An Ordinary Woman and, last year, provided the heroine for a popular romcom called I’m Losing Weight.The good ship Sasha Bortich has been well and truly launched.

The film’s tagline – `Who Can You Trust When You Can’t Even Trust Yourself?` and the producer’s claim that it `explores the fine line between reality and imagination` should give you some hint of the tale’s paranoid and even sometimes feverish ethos. Nevertheless, the word `lavish` kept springing to my mind when I considered the film’s production values.

The action – and there is enough plot material here for at least three separate films -begins from the word go and never slackens. The director juggles with a lot of cobweb covered scary movie tropes such as a decrepid old mansion in the woods, bodies floating in the air, a malevolent boy-child, a wild pack of dogs , blood and fires. Dennis Surov’s effective epic score underlines the intensity of it all meanwhile.

The breathless roller-coaster ride leaves Bortich with little to do except clutch at her temples in agonised discombobulation, ensconced all the while in a capacious green parker. (She is far from the bold temptress that she so well portrayed in Duhless 2).

Not that she is alone. She sometimes has an entourage. This consists of Departed Helpers, who prop themselves up on her furniture, visible only to her (a la Wings of Desire).

The autumnal outdoor shots and the downbeat but homely apartment interiors, together with the swigging of vodka (there is an alarming drink-driving sequence involving Tsyganov’s cop, but even Katya has a hip flask on the ready) gives a real whiff of Russianness to the whole enterprise, whatever other Hollywood cliches it may employ.

At best I was put in mind of the great Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but at times I felt I was undergoing a rerun of Nightwatch. That `first Russian blockbuster` from fourteen years back has cast a long shadow over subsequent Russian horror filmcraft.

The bombastic aspect of that fantasia is evident in the superfluous use of theatrical shock effects, including sudden fires, blood rippling over a person’s face, and people being chucked about by invisible forces. Whilst it is creditworthy that they did not use special effects to do all this, none of it seemed to either forward the plot or add to the atmosphere. The best bits in Provodnik were simple and moving: for example, Katya battering the windows of the car her parents were driving to their deaths in, to no avail.

Practitioners of Russian cinematic chillers would do well to get acquainted with the `less-is-more` principle.This applies more to the horror genre than to other things. Konvert (The Envelope) and Diggeri (Diggers) were both more satisfying for applying a certain minimalist constraint.

I, however, am not the target market for this product. This, I presume, would be young Russian women. Nevertheless, apart from a nervous whispering couple behind me, I sat alone in a central cinema on a sunday evening to watch this. Robin Good, as the Russians call it, was getting all the bums on seats.

Trailer.