`YOU WON’T WAKE UP!` A lugubrious chiller based around lucid dreaming ushers in this year’s batch of Russian screen scares.
This latest in the new cycle of horror flicks to spook Russia tells of a Tragic Young Woman who is Subject to Terrifying Dreams Involving Family Members.
Remind you of anything? I f you have been following this blog it should have done.Provodnik from last November (reviewed below) shared the same blueprint.
However,` tragic-young-women` and so on function as standardised horror tropes ( a result of producers playing to the audience demographic, I suppose) and this competent 16+ certificate supernatural chiller handles them in a different way to that Alexandra Bortich vehicle.
Newbies and Veterans.
The director – Pavel Sidorov from Saint Petersburg – as well as the lead actress – Alexandra Drozdova – constitute relative newcomers.
The producers however – Dmitry Litvinov and Vladislav Severtsev -can claim credit for Nevesti (`The Bride`) from three years back, a watershed for Russian horror cinema owing to its box office takings. Less noteworthy is Severtsev’s involvement in some tosh churned out by Television 3 called Battle of the Psychics which purported to show real events. (The promotional poster for this film seems to imagine this to be a selling point!)
The man behind the plot and the script, meanwhile, had also worked on Vurdalaki (2017) (`Ghouls`), a dark fantasy extravaganza.
Oksana Akinshina is a further luminary who got roped in. This 32-year-old actress from St Petersburg, who appeared in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) , only really has a cameo part here, as the late mother of the heroine, yet her name has been shoved to the front of the publicity material as a stamp of class.
Nightmare on Vyaz Ulitsa.
Sveta is a young woman beset by nightmares involving her mother who she lost in childhood. Only her brother, who seems to be the last surviving member of her family, is around to comfort her when she wakes up screaming.
What then happens one harrowing night, though, is that this young man steps out from the window of their shared flat, plunging to his instant death below….
The corresponding grief of Sveta is portrayed with a brilliant poetic image: we see her sitting on a sofa which is also at the bottom of an open grave. Mourners throw clods of earth onto her from above. (Sidorov has a background in television commercials and this might explain his yen for metaphorical imagery).
Sveta later discovers that her brother was implicated in a sinister cult going by the name of `Dawn`. Her fearful nightmares persist until a loyal friend intervenes.
She encourages Sveta to sign up for a session at the Institute of Somnology in a forested area somewhere outside the city (the narrative is vague about locations).
Here a psychiatry professor, employing state-of-the art technologies, will guide her through `therapeutic` lucid dreams.
There are three other guinea pigs for this experiment: a man tramautised by a fire he escaped played by 49 year old Oleg Vasilkov (Convoy 2012) and a woman who (we learn) killed her own husband, a role evoked by the 39 year old Anna Slyu – who as a participant of the Daywatch and Nightwatch franchise is an old hand at this sort of thing.
Then there is a cheeky young man named Kirill whose fear turns out to be one of claustrophobia. This would-be love interest also makes his debut here (in fact I am not even sure what his name is, which is a shame because, judging from this appearance, he could be a star in the making).
Together they will become immersed in a collective lucid dream; one which will confront them with the deepest fears of all involved…
So we get treated to something like a Mad Doctor scenario, complete with a veneer of `scientism` and something more witchy and demonological. The premise, inspired by lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, is not so new – one could go right back to Dreamscape from 1984- but it is still fresh enough to set Rassvet apart from more common spooky-convent type fare.
What makes this film memorable is its poetic and eerie ambience. The director achieved this through the slow pace and the muted lighting.We see a lot of apprehensive creeping through corridors but jump scares are used in a sparing way and the music (courtesy of 56-year-old Londoner Gary Judd) is rather spectral.
Architecture also plays a key role in this. We get a lot of long shots of the Institute of Somnology – a sprawling moderne concrete affair in the middle-of-nowhere – which, like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, seems almost like a character in the story.
In terms of this (somewhat Russian) atmosphere, I was even reminded of the great Soviet film Solaris (1972) which also concerned dreams made manifest.
Downbeat.
Drosdova has her charms but is no vamp; she functions as more of an approachable girl-next-door than does Bortich’s Alphagirl in Provodnik.
Likewise, with its real world trappings and more focused plot, Rassvet provides more of a feel of reality than its predecessor and nor does it offer any refuge in sentimental uplift. In horror terms, it is the more effective film of the two, even if it seems sombre to a fault.
With little advance publicity through leaflets and posters, I learnt of this film through the interweb alone. Perhaps the producers are relying on sales in the keen Asian market. Indeed I was at the first showing and joining me was a contingent of four Chinese students, who formed a quarter of the audience that night.
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