An age old folk demon is after the kids of a prosperous housing development in Podgaevsky’s latest dark fantasy. My kids are safe. Are YOURS?
How we longed, this year, for that promised big freeze with its white cityscape. But winter never came.
Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest/Baba Yaga: Koshmar Temnova Lesa felt a bit the same. The internet hype first informed me that it would get its release on October 31st of last year. This then was moved forward to the following January. In the event it was in the theatres on 27th February, a deadzone for new films. (The only opposition came from Kalashnikov – a disgraceful biopic of a man who designed mechanisms to kill people with. Jesus wept!)
The irony was that on the day that I saw it, a mini-snow blizzard appeared in the city, as though winter too had made a desperate late showing!
The wait was worth it if only to see how this fifth supernatural tale from the emerging new voice in Russian film craft, the 37-year-old Muscovite Svyatoslav Podgaevsky would shape up.
Not only did he co-direct it (with Natalia Hencker) and co-write the film (alongside Natalya Dubovaya and Ivan Kapitonov) but he co-produced it for Non-Stop films.
As with The Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite (2016) and The Bride (2017) and, in particular, last year’s Rusalka: Lake of the Dead this project offers an idiosyncratic kind of muscular folk horror using East European folk tales as a backdrop.
The cast includes the 37-year-old beauty from Severodvinsk, Svetlana Ustinova, who plays the nanny. Lending the film some needed gravitas Igor Khripunov also partakes. His craggy looks have graced four of Podgaevsky’s previous films, making him a sort of Russian Ralph Bates.
New Moscow.
The location constitutes one of the brand new sleeper dorms that are springing up outside Moscow to cater for wealthy young families( with the metro being expanded in order to accommodate them). Far from exuding the spooky ambience of your traditional horror setting, this locale feels aspirational and septic.
Nevertheless, it functions as an outpost. When the new buildings thin out we run into a dense and expansive area of forest. As the action unfolds the New Town and the Encircling Forest start to feel like players in the story.
Boy-saviour.
Egor, a fourteen year old boy (Oleg Chuginov) forms the film’s protagonist (making a change from the young women common to this genre). His life involves walking to his nearby school, dealing with hoodlums, making approaches to his sweetheart (Glafira Golubeva). and helping to care for his newborn kid sister.
His mother, played by Maryana Spivak (Loveless, 2017) and father, Denis Shvedov (The Mayor, 2013) seem distracted by career demands and hire a nanny to attend to their offspring….
So far we have a slice-of-Russian-middle-class-life. Then Egor starts to notice a presence menacing the baby….
Noticing a shadowy form on the baby’s video monitor, the boy creeps into the room only to be confronted with a menacing female apparition from which he flees….
He will later go deep into the dark forest with his sweetheart and former bully (Artyom Zhigulin) and team up with a hut dwelling hobo called Mrachnny (Khripunov) who has been watching children disappear from the locality and confirms this to be the work of Baba Yaga. The story then becomes a mission to save the baby, and thereby the family.
A Yaga for our times.
Yaga, a long-nosed wicked witch from Slavic folklore often gets depicted as living in a hut held aloft by chicken legs. She flies around on a mortar and displays a penchant for young children. She can, however, play a helpful role when so inclined.
Not so in this film’s updated version! A shape shifter, she she is a femme-fatale as a nanny but later manifests as a sort of peg-legged female Phantom of the Opera. Later on again she appears as an animated mass of red knitting wool.
The tense and humourless action is enlivened with some hallucinatory episodes and we enter a parallel time stream where the baby has become airbrushed out of existence and the now satanic parents are without memory of her. The plot, having begun as a ghost story accelerates into a rollicking dark fantasy romp.
Genre trappings.
For all the originality of the setting, the film falls back on many witchy hokum standbys. There are the kids against the corrupted elders. A bad nanny. Demonic possessions (complete with people’s eyes rolling up to the whites), baby dolls aplenty and people getting hurled about by occult powers.
The shock jumps are lined up like billiard balls and beging to pall after a while.
A portentous and numinous score by Nick Skachkov (On the Edge, 2019) helps to bind it all together.
Breaking new ground.
It feels a bold move to have used as the monster figure as well known to Russians as Jack and the Beanstalk is to Western Europeans. This was all of apiece with Podgaevsky’s earlier films. The last one reinvigorated Rusalka in the same fashion (a water nymph that gets mistranslated into mermaid in English).
Whether this will beget lasting screen idols to equal the vampires and werewolves of the last century remains to be seen. This represents a quiet innovation, however.
Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest sets the suburban modernity of the Russia of now on a collision course with a Slavic demon from very old Russia which lives in a forest next door.
There is plenty for a Jungian style psychoanalyst to chew over here. All of Podgaevsky’s recent movies have introduced us to wrathful female demons, for example. Then what is the significance of the red ball of wool that makes its appearance throughout this film?
Circus.
As with The Bride and Rusalka: Lake of the Dead I felt dazzled by the first hour of the film as the situation was being set up. Then when it all turned into a romp I became ever more detached and restless. Some of the supernatural elements stretched my credulity so much that I felt that anything could happen and the scariness of it got a bit lost.
Likewise, as much as young Egor makes for a valiant hero, he and his tweeny chums gave me the impression that I was sitting through something that might have been better aimed at a much younger demographic. (It is interesting to note that Podgaevsky cut his directorial teeth on a long established comedy T.V show called Jumble which features young kids and their daft ways).
That said this constitutes Podgaevsky’s least derivative and most assured work to date. The film is due to reach audiences in the Baltic States, South East Asia, Latin America and The USA.The director, who is working on a new film (Privorot/Dark Spell), is bound to become recognised on the international stage soon.
The featured image is from K.G Portal.
The trailer (dubbed into English):
