Central Asian Scary Movies have arrived.
I have been treated to a number of quite ambitious chillers and thrillers from young directors from Central Asia these over the past few years (screened with Russian subtitles) in the cinemas of Kazakhstan.
Dastur from Kazakhstan in 2023 brought demonic possession to the heart of Central Asian life. Qumalag, also from Kazakhstan a year later had a teenage girl preyed on by a dark force emanating from the internet. Then, from Kyrgyzstan we had Zhyrkysh (Hunter) in 2024. This featured a policeman and hunter joining forces to find an unknown thing menacing a small village. That same year Ifrit, also from Kyrgyzstan explored the classic girl captured by a satanic entity formula.
It’s time to examine some that have illuminated local cinema screens over the past six months.
Domestic disturbance.
Anel is a domestic supernatural/psychological thriller from Kazakhstan produced by Tiger Films. Released in December last year, it was directed by Akan Satayev who is also known for Racketeer crime drama franchise that began in 2007.
The action revolves around a present-day Kazakh household. The setting constitutes the kind of pseudo-Georgian home that many a wealthy Kazakh lives in on the outskirts of Almaty.
We open on the titular Anel’s 12th birthday (played by Madina Medikyzy). The celebration, lead by her mother Laura (Zarina Karmen) is disrupted when Anel complains of being unwell and has to be excused. That is the beginning of a series of disturbing acts: she throws a bizarre tantrum at school, taunts her housekeeper for being single, and is discovered stuffing herself with raw meat in the kitchen in her sleep. Laura expresses growing concern about her daughter in the face of apparent indifference from her husband and mother-in-law. Nevertheless, they call in a psychiatrist who seems to be impressed by Anel.
However, Laura comes to suspect that her mother-in-law, the composed elder of the family, could well be hiding a sinister secret and have some connection with the events….
The plot seems to parallel Ifrit, yet we are then confounded with a revelation (one for which, I for one, did not see coming) which obliges the viewer to re-evaluate all that has gone before.
Anel is a housebound film with most of the events occurring in the domestic interior. The sight of quivering tree branches as seen in silhouette through a curtained window sets many scenes. The pace is measured and somber, with cello music a part of the score. The putative horror paraphernalia is sheer Dennis Wheatley, with dolls with pins in them, a black goat and even a large red-eyed Satanic figure.
In contrast to Dastur, Anel does not invoke religious concepts and the only issue that it raises is that of alcohol abuse.
The film was shown in the City Mall cinema in Karaganda on Kazakhstan’s Independence Day. We all stood to attention as the national anthem played before the screening. Perhaps, buoyed up by this, some of the audience clapped as the final credits rolled up, which is not something I have encountered before.
Spirit on a mission.
Kyzil Koilek – Girl in a Red Dress – released this April was directed by Belek Turgunov (also known for Ataman, 2023). A spectral chiller from Kyrgyzstan, it was filmed on location on the majestic shores of Issyk-Kul in the western Tan Shien mountains.
The plot outline is all too familiar: a young couple buys a new property in a rural environment and is faced with spooky goings on there.
What makes Girl in a Red Dress distinctive, though, is the setting. The property consists of a disused café which they intend to do up and re-open. (There are countless such stopping off places in Central Asia offering shashlik and goulashes).
The locals are less than welcoming. One of them is caught gazing at them in a lugubrious way but fails to engage with them. The couple take food to a neighbor and, finding the door open, discover the inhabitant to be hiding from them. We learn of a local legend concerning a woman in a blood-soaked dress materializing on the roads and sometimes chasing drivers.
Ignorant of this, Kairat and his wife Asulu and their son Amin set about renovating the old café. They have erected a yurt (a circular tent) just outside the café and this becomes where they live.
It is the child, Amin who first scares his parents. He begins talking to people who are not there and wandering off. Then a painting daubed on the wall of a girl in a red dress re-appears after being painted over and a dancing cactus toy calls out the boy’s name and so on.
We have here a belt-and -braces ghost story of the kind where a vengeful spirit – which turns out to be the ghost of a girl who was gang raped by locals and then killed -is laid to rest. It is the family who will be the eventual redeemers.
Contemporary realism counts as the saving grace of this film with its spartan setting being as fresh as the plotline is as old as the hills.
The monster (and `monster it is, at first) seems almost camp. After brief glimpses of her in jump scares, she wrestles Asulu to the ground and is revealed as a pantomime witch.
The cinema was quite packed when I caught Girl in a Red Dress in early April. Some of the audience seemed a little unprepared for it. A young woman sat to the left of me spent the whole screening ducking down and playing on her phone in an effort not to see what was happening while, behind me, a group of three people left the showing altogether.
The reckoning.
I can hardly imagine how these people would have reacted to Osh (Revenge). This lurid melodrama from Kyrgystan is the work of Ilgis Kuvatback who is also known as the writer of Zombety – a zombie apocalypse T.V serial from five years back.
Osh takes place in a nondescript Kyrgyz village, the kind without internet access. Zhyldyz (Suyun Orolbek making her screen debut) is a local good-natured young woman just married to a policeman from the area. (Imash Azhyul who appeared in Flashback the same year).
One evening Zhyldyz is waylaid by a pack of four vodka-sodden ne’er- do-wells who have had their eye on this village beauty. When one of them grabs her and she defends herself, she is knocked out. She comes around in a dacha of one of the men. It is there that she is subject to sexual abuse from all four of them (one of whom is played by Kuralbek Chokoev who is better known as a singer!)
The men stage an alibi by pouring vodka into the poor girl’s mouth. Indeed, her conventional husband later believes her to have been intoxicated and consenting and visits yet more physical violence on her.
Somewhat later on, Zhyldyz is walking alone in a wooded area of an evening and once again one of the miscreants seizes her looking for a repeat performance. No longer outnumbered, Zhyldyz delivers the blow of a rock to his skull. The man whimpers on the ground, blood oozing from his head. The worm has turned and the woman finds herself relishing the damage she has inflicted.
From that point on we witness a sweet village girl metamorphose into into female rage made flesh as she begins to pick out her tormentors one by one. Even the arrival of two police personnel from the nearest town cannot defeat her. One of the men’s heads is discovered by her mother in a cooking pot. (As with the Voroshilov Shooter from 1999, the viewers sympathies side with the wronged party yet we then seem to be invited to cheer on sadistic and disproportionate acts of retribution).
The drawn-out rape sequence is not titillating and overall graphic depictions are eschewed, yet this can be called a horror film. It is even a little reminiscent of Fatal Attraction (1987) in that the `monster` of the show is an ordinary mortal woman. Indeed, in Osh candles are seen to extinguish before she makes an appearance. The film is not all sensationalism, however: there is much judicious use of music here, most of it Kyrgyz rock and pop but Camille Saint- Saenz’s Dans Macabre provides a soundtrack in one scene.
Following on from Sisters (Russia, 2022), Osh has pretentions to being a film which raises weighty issues. Statistics] concerning violence against women (as with Sisters) are flashed up on the screen just before the credits roll.
As much as it was refreshing to see a Central Asian film in which the Family does not constitute the saviour of all, I left the cinema feeling rather shellshocked. The most striking ingredient of this film must be that it is unsentimental to a fault.
What stands out about this new wave of Central Asian horror is that it – not being flashy, funny or salacious – is not courting the youth market. Maybe it is this which allows it to raise questions that other film genres dare not.
Lead image: Still from Anel – Kursiv.KZ
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