HANG ON IN THERE! : The film OTRYV (BREAKAWAY).

Does the video for Wham’s `Last Christmas` make you retch? The antidote is this new winter-break-from-Hell flick.

There had been little advance publicity for the release of Otryv (Breakaway). The film’s appearance in the cinemas had first been scheduled for January 24th – this is very much a New Year’s tale after all. In the event, however it got its first public screening on February 14th. This was fitting too as, with its romantic subplot, the film could function as a date movie.

Two days into its release the audience at the suburban cinema in Zhulebino reached double figures and contained a mix of ages. Perhaps the word was already out that we had a winner here – for winner it is.

High Suspense.
This 16+ certificate tale of peril over the snowy  mountain tops, a suspense-disaster-action-thiller, delivers just the right fist-gnawing -how-will-they-get-out-of-that? -thrill.
It proceeds from a high concept premise: a group of kids marooned on a stalled cable car in freezing weather conditions.

Directed and in part penned by Tigran Sahahkyan- whose main claim to greatness comes from having directed a much awarded movie short called Haroshoya Rabota (Nice Work) five years ago – Otryv can be viewed as Adrift meets Touching the Void, with the entrapment of the first and sense of vertigo of the other.

Bright idea.
On a winter break in the Urals, a merry band of sporty twenty-something friends, three boys and two girls, decide to see the New Year in on a funicular. The aim is to reach the top of a mountain and then descend back to base with their snowboards.
To this end they come to a private arrangement with an old cable car operator (Vladimir Gusev).

The crazy venture goes to plan until the grizzled old machinist has an accident which results in him getting tangled up and then killed by the machinery. Suspended above a ravine, the cable car grinds to a halt in mid air – while below them all of nearby civilisation is deep in revelry….

From here the narrative piles on further calamities in an uncompromising way. A hatch blows open, an attempt to lower one of them to the ground with a rope results in death, there is a snowstorm and – as is the convention – one of the party turns out to be a bit of a dementoid. Confinement, heights, subzero temperatures and conflict are all rolled into one.

Meanwhile, one of the party has been left behind on the ground, following a spat with his girlfriend. As he sulks in their hotel he comes to realise, little by little that something is up. Can he become their saviour?

Brat pack?
The young cast act with conviction but the one who stands out is the thirty year old Mikhail Fillipov. He is the crazed one and he embraces this dislikable role with commendable gusto.

Ingrid Olyenskaya, 26, made her name as the cynical schoolgirl in the cult comedy film Neadekvatnye Ludi (Inadequate People) from 2010 and, likewise, her on-screen lover, 34-year-old Denis Kozyakov has a face much seen in light comedies.

Andrey Nasimov plays the jilted lover-cum-rescuer. He is something of a cinema heart-throb, having played the lead in Chernaya Molniya (Black Lightning) back in 2009.

Irina Antonenko gets to play the queen bee of the story. This beauty contest trophy holder nevertheless has notched up some significant film roles. In 2012 she turned up in The Darkest Hour, an alien invasion scenario made by a Western producer, which just happened to be set in Moscow. Then three years ago she lent her charms to Krasnaya, an intriguing `Ostern` (or `Red Western`).
One of the film’s strength is the exotic locale. The cinematographer Sergey Dysnuk, who has been the lensman for two anticipated science fiction movies due ot this year – Project Gemini and Koma – has brought out the majesty of the sbowbound peaks here.

This ambience is enhanced by an airy synthesiser keyboard score courtesy of Alexei Chinchoff. This in turn is interspersed with Western pop music, such as some solo work by Chris Martin.
If the production can be called `slick` – it is so in a good way.

A trend.
The Russian big screen has flirted with catastrophe thrillers before. In 2013 the superb Metro, in which a Moscow carriage gets trapped undergorund following a flooding, had real impact. The three years later the blockbuster Ekipazh (Aircrew) arrived. Attempting a revival of the Airport-type franchise this brought volcanoes, earthquakes and lightning storms into the proceedings.
You might also include Ledokol (Icebreaker) (2016), a fact based docudrama a about a nuclear ice breaker which becomes locked in the ice of the Arctic.

(My review of Ekipazh and Ledokol (for `Moskvaer`) here and here).

Not a `feelgood movie`.
Those films offered heroic adventures for family audiences. Not so Otryv, which, from its baleful big red title onwards, borrows a lot from the horror genre.
The scenario of a posse of high-spirited college kids being picked off one by one is the most obvious scary movie cliché on show here.

Then we have two popcorn-on-the -floor nightmare sequences from which the heroine awakes with a start. In addition, the use of live video links by phone where the characters appear to speak directly to the camera, whilst in real-time, seems like a nod to the `found footage` subgenre.
(Also the cable car is named `The Overlook`. A reference to the hotel in `The Shining`?)

So is the film just a white knuckle ride? Perhaps, but whether intended or not, you can view this, without much forcing, as an allegorical depiction of the middle class youth of todays’ Russia. They have been abandoned by their elders and left to fend for themselves in hostile circumstances. Left hanging.

Could travel.
Still Otryv, more than any other recent Russian film I have watched, mirrors its American counterparts. The Urals-wintersport backdrop may give it freshness, but otherwise there can be found little intrinsic `Russianess` to the movie. It could sell well in America and Europe. As much as it is early days, it would have to be a good thriller for me not to see this as the best film of its kind from this year.

The Trailer.

Official website (English).