DOMOVOI:A new Folk Horror fantasy from Russia pits an an old folk goblin against the Devil himself. Is it evidence of a coming patriotic trend in Russian cinema or something more subtle?
Domovoi represents the first Russian film in the horror genre to come my way since Detektor from two years back. (We could mention Claustro here, but for all its ethnic Russian connections this remains a Kazakh product).
Two weary years and three months have dragged on since Russia’s commander-in-chief ordered his tanks and soldiers to make their way into a neighbouring sovereign nation. Many Russian motion pictures doing the rounds since that fateful day will have been produced and shot previous to it. Now, however, enough time has elapsed for us to start to see products produced in the atmosphere of Russia in a time of war. Domovoi is one such a film.
Domovoi came out from Nashe Kino on 4th April of this year. It consists of an overt contribution to the folk horror subgenre. This subgenre has gained traction in many countries of late with such films as Midsommar (2019) and, from Indonesia, Dancing Village: The Curse Begins (2024). Here regional folklores form the basis for supernatural terrors in the here and now.
Guest from Slavic folklore.
Here it is the turn of the domovoi to be the creature that gets featured. This East European hobgoblin, also known as the Old Man of the House, dwells in the back of stoves. He may incorporate the spirit of a long dead family member. Sometimes also taking the form of a pig or a cat, the domovoi’s main role is to defend the hearth and home, although he can be capricious. (Nor is is he just from the past: I have spoken to at least two young Russian women who were prepared to give some credence to his existence).
Old hands.
A Chelyabinsk born 48-year-old called Andrey Zagidullin sat on the tall chair for this film. He already boasts a track record of a string of TV thrillers to his credit such as Senser (2019), Phantom (2012) and Whirlpool (2022) like a Podgaevsky of television.
The script is from Ivan Eliseev (Syndrome, 2021) and Maria Ogneva who worked on the rather similarQueen of Spades 2: Through the Looking Glass (2019).
The two main stars are Vasilia Nemtsova who is but 14 and whose cameo performance in Epidemia (2019) drew comment from one Stephen King saying that it gave him goosebumps (Yandex.KZ/turbo, 5/12/2019).
She acts alongside the fresh-faced twenty-year -old Oleg Chugunov who has been quite prolific with screen appearances of late, but who I last saw six years ago in the leading role in Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest.
Natalia Vdovina and Vitaly Kishenko are convincing enough as the conniving step-parents but the player who gifts the drama with a real classy presence is one Rosa Khairullina. This award winning 62-year-old actress, like a sort of female Peter Cushing, brings a palpable forbidding gravitas to her role as a female shaman.
Displacement.
The main action opens in a primitive but alluring wooden dacha in a rural area (it would not have beern so out of place in Onegin in fact). Artyom (Chugunov) and Varya (Nemstova) live there a spartan life as, having lost their parents in an accident, they are looked after by their elderly and ailing grandmother – and they look after her too.
When she croaks her last on her bed, she leaves the young pair the advice that, in accordance with long held lore, they should take a piece of coal from the current residence and transfer it to the fire of any new household they should find themselves in.
Later, installed in a new school the kids are soon taken by a wealthy couple in the architecture business. Their home, as might be expected, is all minimalism and swish modernity in the Scandinavian style. Artyom makes an effort to gel with this new beginning but his younger sister feels uneasy and cannot.
The residence does have a fire, however, and the children, remembering their granny, consign to lumps of coal from their old house to its flames.
It is from that point that the things begin to befall the house. An entity seems to be making itself known. The step-parents, who have been hiding their own murky secret, decide to call in the services of a witch to banish this spectral intruder.
`What do you know about the cult of the ancestor? ` this imposing woman asks of her clients. She is making reference to the domovoi….
The fantasia will take us through various rituals and the action will lead us back to the old dacha. There a possessed Varya in league with the domovoi will unleash their sorcery to battle with the Great Horned One himself….
Sombre story.
It is the direction and then the photography that impresses the viewer at first. The former establishes a kind of doomy intensity which pervades everything and the latter evokes a crepuscular world of washed out blues and shadows.
The moody soundtrack, for which the much in demand 53-year-old Chuvash violinist Alexei Aigi is responsible, reinforces the sense that this is no disposable teen flick of a film, but something treading deeper waters.
In spite of this Domovoi does trip up. It unveils the monster far too soon in the narrative and then the culmination is a showdown in the style of a VyatcheslavPodgaevsky film (Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest et al) where every mainstay of contemporary horror film – floating people, attenuated screaming, glowing eyes…ad nauseam are all rolled into a ball and hurled at us.
A film for its time?
The cinema in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where I saw the film on April 6th was fuller than such films are as a rule. Indeed, there is something of a chasm between the critical response and what the ordinary punters are saying about it. The latter seem satisfied at seeing a proper scary movie and one with a national flavor. The magazine critics though, riding on the back of their unshakeable view that Russians can never do horror, have carped at all manner of technical details about the plotting or the script.
There were some more nuanced write ups. Alexey Litovchenko writing in Kinoreporter.ru dubbed the film `the first patriotic mystical horror`. He did so on account of the fact that the character of the domovoi `personifies family values, the memory of generations, spirituality and all that is native and age old`. The witch, on the other hand, embodies `imported Western mysticism`.
Litovchenko seems to have hit on something here. Of course, Podgaevsky has been churning out similar kind of homespun occult yarns for over a decade now, but Domovoi seems to have nailed its colours to its mast in a more blatant way that any of his ever did. Can we bracket this film in the same surreptitious Z-patriot league as Onegin?
One thing that confuses the matter is the closing scene. The two orphans, their old home having been burnt to the ground and their would-be minders carted off by the politisia, find themselves alone in the morning moping though the ashy ruins with nothing but an old icon to provide them with any comfort….Could this be a metaphor for a desolate and isolated post-war Russia?
All political underpinnings aside, there are two fresh features in the film which I enjoyed. One is the location in a modern building quite unlike the hackneyed Old Dark House backdrop to such tales. The other is the fact that it upended the usual `the-Monster-be- Bad` expectation.
Main image: Youtube.