Russian Horror – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

BETTER THE DEMON WE KNOW….

`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 4^th 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).

The screen friendly version of the domovoi. [horfor.online]

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).

The muse: Vasilia Nemstova [Kinoteatr.ru]

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.

Rosa Khairullina stealing the show [Kinoteatr.ru]

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 6^th 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.

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

THE ABRAMENKO EXPERIMENT: THE FILM `SPUTNIK`.

Egor Abramenko’s intense cosmic threat thriller SPUTNIK is so much more than a Russian Alien.

With mounting alarm the young psychologist observes the scene unfolding on the CCTV. The cosmonaut is thrown to the floor in a convulsive motion. From his mouth oozes a ridge of slime. Two spindly limbs emerge from this and the being begins to creep forward. The military man, also watching, has seen this all before….

Sputnik means satellite in Russian but also carries connotations of fellow traveller. The film with this title, a thriller with a science-fiction premise and scary movie trappings, is a rare beast in Russia. Such a mix of genres is matched only by The Fatal Eggs, an adaptation of the Bulgakov novel from 1995 and Diggers (2016) and Avanpost from last year.

Intended for release last April, the film ended up getting its premier on the net, owing to the pandemic. There it gathered over one million viewers in Russia alone. I, however, waited for the cinema doors to be flung open again, and my patience was rewarded. SPUTNIK is one picture that deserves to be experienced in a large and loud format.

Egor Abramenko, the man on the high stool, has been churning out commercials for years but his other brainchild was an eleven minute long short called Passenger released three years ago. This was to be the egg that was to hatch SPUTNIK.

Some bankable celebrities signed up for the project. That Golden Boy of the Russian media Fyodor Bondarchuk has come from behind the cameras to fill one of the main roles. So has the stately 33 year-old St Petersburgian Oksana Akinshina, who had a cameo role in Rassvet, this time being given prime space.

Interrupted mission.
Andropov is in the Kremlin – it is 1983 – and around the earth circle two cosmonauts on a routine orbital mission. They are about to re-enter the atmosphere when it happens. There is an unholy knock on the spacecraft’s hull….Only one of the crew members makes it back to terra firma alive – and he has black eyes….

Later a female psychologist – Tatyana Klimova – with a history of employing maverick methods, (Akinshina) is getting a dressing down at a tribunal in Moscow. As she leaves in disgrace she is approached by a military colonel called Semiparov (Fyodor Bondarchuk). He considers her to be of made of the right stuff for a position he has to offer her. This involves reaearch into a unique incident.

He chaperones her on a journey to the Caucuses. There, in a military installation, she learns that a cosmonuat who is supposed to have died on return is alive but infected with a parasite of unearthly origin, and no memory of how it got there. (Pyotr Fyodorov who also appeared in Avanpost).

Soon Tatyana begins to harbour qualms about the humanitarian implications of how this hero of the Soviet Union is being treated – as well as the uses to which the resulting knowledge will be put. Can she escape the compound and return to Moscow to expose the dark doings of this rogue operation?

Space age possession.
This 1 hour and 53 minute drama has a measured pace and highlights the human dilemmas that the situation throws up (challenging the view that science fiction and horror lacks human depth). There is even a sort of sub-plot concerning the neglected child of the cosmonaut, languishing away in a care home in Rostov-on-the-Don.

The two story writers Andrey Zolotarev and Oleg Malovichko had also both worked on Attraction (2017) and Invasion (2020) which were alien contact tales directed by Bondarchuk. Those blockbusters, however, were frothy fun-for-all-the-family affairs whereas SPTUTNIK contains more intelligence in its details.

With SPUTNIK being something of a star vehicle for her, Akinshina makes for a likeable lead. She is no Sigourney Weaver-like action hero but a woman constrained by her professional role while thrown into an extraordinary situation.

Bondarchuk, meanwhile, does what he does best: lend gravitas to the proceedings. He portrays a complex man with some paternal affection for Tatyana and a begrudging dependence on the creature who he wishes to isolate and exploit.

The assistant-to-the-heroine is a stiff white-coated drudge of a research scientist (played with conviction by Anton Vasilev) whose conscience is awakened by Tatyana. It is he who phones through to the Moscow authorities with some important information before being gunned down.

The creature itself is a fine piece of work, if not original.Stitched up by Main Road Post, its a puppet and CGI slimy quadruped with several eyes, insectoid limbs, buzz saw teeth and cute floppy ears. Living off the hormones produced by fear, it has a penchant for cracking open heads and slurping on the contents.

Last, but no means least is the score by Oleg Karpachev. With its bombastic drum-heavy sound, this really signs and seals the sense of a shadowy secret mission.

Well received.
The primary mood is one of mounting unease. It is refreshing to see that the director has not relied on sudden noises and appearances to stun us, but instead there are some drawn out nightmarish sequences, such as when the alien is being fed live prisoners. There is some gross out involved as well as some tomato ketchup flying about (both untypical for a Russian film) but this is restrained.

The 1983 period placement is a puzzle. Is a hidden event in history being shown to us – as in Apollo 18 ? Or is it a way round the problem of how to portray the military as fragmented and corrupted without incurring the wrath of the censors? Or is this just an exercise in nostalgia? (An iconic Russian toy does play a part in the proceedings).

Reaching America and the UK, SPUTNIK has set forth an excited rattle of keyboards and much of what is being said is positive. The default comparison most seem to be making is with the Alien franchise.

True SPUTNIK has a ballsy heroine, but this is less rare in Russian cinema, and otherwise it is earth bound, set in the past, and much less of a stalk-and-slash romp. A more telling comparison is with the British television series from 1953 – The Quatermass Experiment. The initial premise is almost identical except that SPUTNIK then takes off on a different tangent.

Russian language promo for the British series `The Quatermass Experment` Was this the real inspiration behind the film? [sweet.tv]

For me, the film leans too much on hackneyed tropes about a caring, maternal woman in opposition to a monomanic, ruthless male. Otherwise, the borrowing fom Nigel Kneale aside, it is quite fresh and there is something primal and archetypal in the idea of a man having a goblin in his stomach which comes out by night. As Tatiana asks: Parasite or symbiote?.

Many Russian horror movies seem targetted at a young South East Asian audience and tend to play down their national origins. Not so SPUTNIK, which -with its setting in the steppes, glimpse of Soviet times and concern with military machinations – is Russian through and through.

Lead image: in-rating.ru

The trailer (English subtitles):

Lukyanenko’s Last Hurrah: The novel THE SIXTH WATCH.

Is this a farewell to the Watch Saga?

Invoke the name of Sergei Lukyanenko and the following picture may well pop into your mind: An uber-Russian-Muscovite who catapulted to fame through a string of hard edged and scary fantasy novels commencing with The Nightwatch.

Think again. The real Lukyanenko hails from Karatau in South Kazakhstan. He only arrived in Moscow, at the age of 28, in 1996. By that time he had already published quite a few novels in the space opera genre and which were influenced by the American writer Robert Heinlen.

As for `hard-edged` and so on, his prose is distinguished by its philosophical humour, occasional sentimentality and its promotion of the need for compromise in a world where there are no absolute truths. Packaging aside, he is not a horror writer as such. The gist is somewhere between the decided grimness of Dmitry Glukhovsky and the light touch of Boris Akunin – in fact more the latter.

I first encountered his books over a decade ago. They were huge in Russia and easy to find in translation and I read them as a duty, despite not being all that keen on mythical magic-based fiction. The main tning that I got from them was an introduction to life on the Moscow of today.

Urban fantasy pioneer.

This time I reached for The Sixth Watch in preparation for the lockdown to come. Also I felt that it would be interesting to find out how the creator brings his iconic series to a close.

Lukyanenko likes to think of hinself as a successor to the Strugatsky brothers and his first novel, Knights of the Forty Islands (1990) was a science fiction one, (and remains untranslated).

The Nightwatch (1998) was the tale that would vanish off the shelves, however. It introduced the world to the Others – supernatural beings such as vampires and magicians, werewolves and prophets who walk amongst us in human guise and are locked into a Cold War style detente between the forces of Light and Darkness. This is mediated by the nether world known as the Twilight (which the film version translates, rather better, into The Gloom).

It was a fellow Kazakh and director Timur Bekmambetov who was the first to recognise the cinematic qualities of this world and so in 2004 a bit of Russian cultural history was made. The film version of Nightwatch entered cinemas and was followed two yeats later with Daywatch. These represent a soft power breakthrough for Russia, with few critics having a bad word to say about them.

Scene from `Nightwatch (2004) [Slashfilm.com]`

Thr films also functioned as starmakers with Anton Khabensky, Anna Slyu, Sergei Trofimov and the band Gorod 312 all making their names here.

Lukyanenko has been credited, via his brand of urban fantasy, with taking fantasy to a wider age group and, indeed, many a `paranormal romance` potboiler, starting with Stephanie Myer’s Twilight series, owes something to him.

The portly dreamweaver has thus become something of an ambassador of Russia, much as Henning Mankell is for Sweden.

Some commentators have taken to badmouthing him for his `chauvinism`, in particular in connection with his stance on the Ukraine issue. This, however, despite being expressed in a theatrical way, is not so different from the mainstream one throughout much of Russia.

Anton returns.

Anton Gorodetsky, the Higher Light Magician remains our narrator and protagonist in The Sixth Watch. He seems happy in his marriage and has a daughter who is an Enchantress. He continues to work as a Nightwatch agent. It is in this role that he finds himself hunting down an errant vampiress on the loose on the streets of Moscow. This creature, furthermore, seems to be waging some sort of vendetta against Gorodetsky, but turns out, in fact, to be warning him. There is an oncoming apocalypse, he learns.

Cover from the Russian version of `The Sixth Watch or Shyestoi Dozor` [ozon.ru]

The plot, after the manner of the whole series, soon starts to resemble the serpentine digressions of an espionage thriller as an ancient Demon-God called The Two in One returns to reassert its dominion.To forestall the destruction of all life on Earth, even the Others, Gorodetsky has to gather together a convocation of of the heads of all the vampires, witches,prophets, shapeshifters and magicians. This then is the Sixth Watch: a sort of Seven Samurai -like defence league.

I stifled yawns through some of the portentous details about rituals and incantations and so on and so lost the thread at times. The fresh and vivid rendering of being at a witches rally and a vampire conference brought a smile to my face though.

Lukyanenko’s wining trick is to merge his world of paranormal events with quotidian domesticity.

As Gorodetsky prepares an omelette for his spunky fifteen year old daughter, who is also a prime target for the dark forces at play, he reminds her that putting too much salt in it would be bad for her health.

Lukyanenko also offers a nice line in ironic humour as shown in the following exchange with a doctor called Ivan:

`I once met a man who mixed petals into his tea, said Ivan, pouring the strong brew before diluting it with hot water.`It was disgusting muck. And what is more tose petals were slowly poisoning him`

`So how did it all end?` I asked.

`He died`, the healer said shrugging. `Knocked down by a car. `

What gives Lukyanenko’s writng its idiosyncratic flavour are the jaundiced observations on the urban life of today which always make you sit up even if they appear curmudgeonly. There is, too, the refreshing fact that in this novel we get a hero who is not a detached brainbox nor an alcoholic divorcee, but a family man.

The fairytle like climax put me in mind of Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1835) and made any tedium I had thus far tolerated seem worth it. Also it did seem to make any further resurrection of the series well-nigh impossible.

Andrew Bromfied, that busy and ubuiquitous Yorkshireman who also brought the mini-classic Headcrusher to an Anglophone readership, seems to have engaged with Lukyanenko’s intentions quite well here. One or two moments of wooden dialogue aside, you would be unaware that you are reading a translation most of the time.

Mixed reception.

How are the Western fanboys and girls taking the shutters coming down on their cherished series?

Not so well.

On Youtube Polyanna’s Bookclub opines: `You can’t just end it like that – there’s got to be something next!` Over in Goodreads an Esteban Siravegna is more forthright:

`It feels as if Lukyanenko got fed up with the saga and decided to end it for once and for all, or that he needed the money`.

Man at a crossroads.

But Lukyanenko, as his folksy website makes clear, has other frogs legs and spider’s webs on the boil. He has made a foray into alternate world fantasy with Rough Draft (Chernovik) which was filmed, to muted reviews, in 2018. He is also a fixture on the video games in industry.However, if he were to conjure up a new Watch novel a few moons hence, I would not be so surprised. Seven is a magical number, after all.

The Sixth Watch' is published by Arrow Books, London (2016)

The main image is from twitter.com

THE WICKED WITCH ISN’T DEAD: The film BABA YAGA: TERROR OF THE DARK FOREST.

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 superb promotional poster for this film did much to cement its reputation long before it hit the screens. [Yello.com]

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):

IT’S NOT A BOY! The film `Tvar` (`Stray`).

Another demon-child yarn with added sophistication, a pleasing autumnal ambience and a great role for Elena Lyadova.

All too many of the Russian made scary movies that I have promoted on here have had certain features in common. As much as they have prompted me to nod my head with a smile, they have sought to mimic Hollywood and to court those of college age.

Among the exceptions to this is TVAR (STRAY) a chiller delivered with some style. In fact, this enterprise is assured enough to risk being subtle as well as – not always a quality found in modern Russian cinema – original in parts.

From the `Queen of horror`.

TVAR opened in the cinemas on 28th November this year with a 16+ certificate. The picture houses sold it as a `detective mystery story`, which may be significant terms of marketing,, but this is really a supernatural thriller par excellence and one tailor made for the season in which it appeared.

The creator of the story is none other than Anna Starobinets who, on account of her short stories, has been dubbed Russia’s `Queen of horror`. Behind the cameras was Olga Gorodetska, who here is directing her first full length film (an hour and a half long). Ilya Ovsenev, who has worked on the forthcoming `Project Gemini`, was the cinematographer. Several production companies seem to have had some involvement in TVAR. The notable ones include Star Media – the purveyors of numerous effective television melodramas – and TV3, who seem to have their hand in every pie these days.

The main star on consists of Elena Lyadova, the 39-year-old Morshansk born actress,who many will be familiar with from the grim social-realist fable Leviathan (2014). She is joined by Vladimir Vdovichenkov who is 48 and also appeared in Leviathan. An other talent is Yevgeny Tsyganov who featured in Provodnik last year.

Family drama.

TVAR revolves around hearth and home and in the relations between man and wife and their children. In accordance with this, the areas touched on include grief, self-deception and indomitable mother love.

A couple in early middle -age, in recovery from the unspeakable loss of their first son, form the main protagonists. They find themselves visiting an orphange outside Moscow with the aim of finding a surrogate son to adopt.

Overseen by nuns, the forbidding institution is filled with cots, but none of their inhabitants inspire Polina, the bereaved mother (Lyadova), a former teacher. However, she then claps eyes on a wayward and neglected child who has secreted himself away in the basement of the building following the suicide of his father.

Enigma.

She is at once drawn to this odd-looking and angular child. When she asks to be granted the role of his new mother, she is met with some resistance from the nuns and also some scepticism from her more conventional but supportive husband (Vdovichenkov).

Polina persists and at length the couple take the boy to their home. The boy seems to respond to the loving attentions of his new mother but remains somewhat feral. He is given to scurrying beneath his bed when people appear,stuffing raw meat into his mouth, and crouching on top of furniture ready to pounce.( A bold performance from one Sevastyan Bugaev). On top of all that, there is mounting evidence that this boy is no ordinary maladjusted kid. He commits a serious assault on another child, for example. Nevertheless, the smitten mother comes to believe that he could even be a reincarnation of her lost son….

The Polina finds herself to be pregnant with a new child of her own….

New handling.

The drama skirts close to two cinema classics concerning demonic children: The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) and even seems to reference them in one or two scenes.

That said, as much as the blood-and-thunder elements are central to the tale, the film downplays them a bit. It does so through the use of anti-climax and avoidance of clichés, putting only enough pepper into the soup to give it the necessary tang. So the supernatural situation may be old hat, but the handling of it blows the cobwebs away.

A film for its season.
[kinoafisha.info]

The adventurous photography of Ovsenev (we are treated to some unusual camera angles) and the overall direction (we are confounded with a false ending) make for memorable stylish stuff.

Then an overaching ambient score (from Alexander Slyootskiy and Karim Nasser) ramps up the Halloween atmosphere as the action moves between the creepy nun’s mansion, the couple’s swish Moscow apartment and then their dacha in the forest.

It is Lyadova’s sustained performance as a woman haunted in every sense of the word that adds gravitas to the whole tale.

TVAR has something of Don’t Look Now (1973) about it and also, from the same period, makes a nod towards Solaris (1972) at one key juncture. TVAR, though, with its small innovations and misty twilight setting, is all its own. It offers horror for grown ups.

TRAILER FOR `TVAR`

Featured image: youtube.com.

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.

`It wasn’t like this for George Michael!`
[mobi.com]

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.

“`Death not in the mountains!` The slogan of the film.
[C.T.B films/ Attraktion]

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).

Bad Dreams with no Boundaries: the film`RASSVET` (`SUNRISE`/`QUIET IS THE DAWN`)`)

`YOU WON’T WAKE UP!` A lugubrious chiller based around lucid dreaming ushers in this year’s batch of Russian screen scares.

The Moscow movie goers who arrived to check out Rassvet (`Sunrise` AKA `Quiet Is the Dawn`) when it screened at the end of January may well have experienced a bit of deja vu.

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.

Alexandra Drosdova in her screen debut.[kg-portal.ru]

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.

Oksana Akinshina guest starring in “`Rassvet`.[in-rating.ru]

Atmosphere.
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.

The Trailer (English subtitles).

PROVODNIK (SOUL CONDUCTOR).

This blood-and-thunder paranormal thriller provides a showcase for Russia’s new poster girl.

Katya may look like any ordinary city gal but she has a very busy life. She is an empath who consorts with the dead and becomes plagued by ominous visions. She is still dealing with the trauma of her parent’s death by car crash when she was a child. She gets drawn to a spooky mansion where she once witnessed a demonic rite play out. Her dead twin sister returns to her to warn her that her own killer – a serial killer – is still on the loose. Turning to the police for help she finds they fail to believe her. Well, would you?

Provodnik – the title just means `conductor` but is translated into Soul Conductor in English promotions – is a 16+ certificate hour and a half long blend of Dark Fantasy and Psycho-thriller. From `the Russian offices of Twentieth Century Fox` (whatever that means), the film was overseen by 48-year-old Ilya Markov who has a background in television, as do the writing duo of Anna Kurbatova and Alexandr Torpuria.

A baggy green parka modelling the latest Alexandra Bortich look.
[filmpro.ru]

Evgeny Tsyganov (Peter FM) plays the weary criminal investigator with conviction but the camera’s gaze is forever set on one Alexandra Nikolaevna Bortich. With her cornfield coloured hair, ice blue eyes and catwalk friendly physique, Bortich functions as a `Russian rose` (in fact she hails from the Gomel region of Belorussia).The woman of the moment, she looks out from the front covers of women’s magazines and is playing the lead in a TV show in Russia called An Ordinary Woman and, last year, provided the heroine for a popular romcom called I’m Losing Weight.The good ship Sasha Bortich has been well and truly launched.

The film’s tagline – `Who Can You Trust When You Can’t Even Trust Yourself?` and the producer’s claim that it `explores the fine line between reality and imagination` should give you some hint of the tale’s paranoid and even sometimes feverish ethos. Nevertheless, the word `lavish` kept springing to my mind when I considered the film’s production values.

The action – and there is enough plot material here for at least three separate films -begins from the word go and never slackens. The director juggles with a lot of cobweb covered scary movie tropes such as a decrepid old mansion in the woods, bodies floating in the air, a malevolent boy-child, a wild pack of dogs , blood and fires. Dennis Surov’s effective epic score underlines the intensity of it all meanwhile.

The breathless roller-coaster ride leaves Bortich with little to do except clutch at her temples in agonised discombobulation, ensconced all the while in a capacious green parker. (She is far from the bold temptress that she so well portrayed in Duhless 2).

Not that she is alone. She sometimes has an entourage. This consists of Departed Helpers, who prop themselves up on her furniture, visible only to her (a la Wings of Desire).

The autumnal outdoor shots and the downbeat but homely apartment interiors, together with the swigging of vodka (there is an alarming drink-driving sequence involving Tsyganov’s cop, but even Katya has a hip flask on the ready) gives a real whiff of Russianness to the whole enterprise, whatever other Hollywood cliches it may employ.

At best I was put in mind of the great Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but at times I felt I was undergoing a rerun of Nightwatch. That `first Russian blockbuster` from fourteen years back has cast a long shadow over subsequent Russian horror filmcraft.

The bombastic aspect of that fantasia is evident in the superfluous use of theatrical shock effects, including sudden fires, blood rippling over a person’s face, and people being chucked about by invisible forces. Whilst it is creditworthy that they did not use special effects to do all this, none of it seemed to either forward the plot or add to the atmosphere. The best bits in Provodnik were simple and moving: for example, Katya battering the windows of the car her parents were driving to their deaths in, to no avail.

Practitioners of Russian cinematic chillers would do well to get acquainted with the `less-is-more` principle.This applies more to the horror genre than to other things. Konvert (The Envelope) and Diggeri (Diggers) were both more satisfying for applying a certain minimalist constraint.

I, however, am not the target market for this product. This, I presume, would be young Russian women. Nevertheless, apart from a nervous whispering couple behind me, I sat alone in a central cinema on a sunday evening to watch this. Robin Good, as the Russians call it, was getting all the bums on seats.

Trailer.

Nikki Gogol: Superstar.

Witchcraft is afoot in the village again and Gogol must pull himself together enough to help…in the latest in this genre-busting movie series!

The distraught friends are carrying a coffin to the burial ground of Dikanka. This contains the body of Nikolai Gogol, demon-slayer. After the earth has been piled onto this, Gogol’s eyes open and, screaming, he begins the frantic scramble to escape premature burial. A departing friend hears the noise and turns in time to see a hand emerging from the grave. Gogol is back…!

Gogol: The Terrible Revenge (Gogol: Strazhnaya Mest) forms the closing act of a trilogy that introduces a fictional variant of that famed Ukrainian Man of Letters: Nikolai Gogol ( a standard bust of whom is shown above, in a random park in Vladimir). In this he is a psychic who assists a detective struggling to banish an ancient curse which had been cast on the village of Dikanka. The premise seems preposterous and I called my review (for Moskvaer) of the first in the series Sorry, Gogol. (Read it here).

The second part Gogol: Viy I even declined to see, not wanting my memory of the great Soviet horror film Viy (1967) to become besmirched.

Here we are again though! Wikipedia terms this franchise `fantasy-action-horror-mystery-thriller`. So as not to be short of breath, I would rather just say `Dark Fantasy. ` If you can imagine that Tim Burton had overdosed on Slavic folklore you would get the idea.

The I hour 50 minute long 16+ certificate film spooked cinema goers since 30^th August this year and was produced by a collaboration between Sreda Production company and the entertainment channel TV3. The latter, which is already known for its hocus-pocus content, intends to broadcast the show later as a TV serial. Indeed (according to IMDb) this constitutes the first TV show to be screened first at the cinema!

Pantomime.

The action takes place in a fairytale 1829 universe where a large cartoonish moon hangs over the village. The colours of the photography seem autumnal and muted, the actors faces pallid. The acting seems quite `stagey` but the swashbuckling glamour of the early Nineteenth Century is put across well. The cast seem to be enjoying themselves but are serious enough about it so as not to let the whole thing descend into camp parody. They are an attractive lot too: in particular the 22 year old Taisa Volkova, a sort of Russian Billy Piper, has the sort of features which you feel you could gaze at forevermore.

Witch-hunt.

There is no need for a Spoiler Alert here. The plot is serpentine and the proceedings held together by quite lengthy dialogue (making it heavy-going on this Russian learner).

Suffice to say that Gogol (Alexander Petrov) continues to be overwhelmed and discombobulated throughout as friends and lovers turn out to be in league with demons. His ebullient associate, Inspector Yakov (Oleg Menshikov) then arrives on horseback from St Petersburg with handcuffs ready to arrest these blackguards. Meanwhile, we encounter much in the way of talons extending from human fingers, infernos and swirling flocks of birds and all that sort of thing.

Hip History.

On a more educational level, we get a bit of a biography lesson as scenes from Gogol’s early work Evening on A Farm in Dikanka are interlaced with episodes of Gogol’s own life. The conceit is that these fantastical occurrences really happened to him and that he later wrote them up as fiction. It is all rather innovative, but to look for a precedent imagine Shakespeare in Love meets Van Helsing

They deliver the whole farrago with gusto – there is even a bespoke song as the credits roll by the lead singer of the group Leningrad. Even though I felt that I had viewed nothing more than a diverting side-show, nevertheless I will never quite see Nikolai Vasiliech Gogol in the same way again.

English subtitled trailer here.

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?

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

`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?