Digital Saints – Weekend
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Revived is an American project by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs studio, directed by Yegor Baranov (Gogol). Unlike the Catholic Church, which, according to the plot of the film, learned to resurrect the dead, the filmmakers ruined their own high-concept with a weak script and low budget.
The miracle has finally happened: the Vatican has learned to return from the other world those who have recently died. The icon of the eschatological revolution is a guy named Nick (Julian Moser), who died in a car accident a few years ago and became the first to be resurrected. While the whole world is discussing the ethical component of the issue, the Catholic Church continues to do its good, at first glance, work. However, oddities appear in the story of resurrections. Priest Stanley (Dave Davis), coincidentally (or not?) – the father of the same Nick, is shocked by a terrorist attack committed by one of his parishioners. Moreover, the terrorist turned out to be not an ordinary Christian, but a “reborn” one. It soon turns out that there are many such incidents, but they are all carefully hidden from the public.
With such a plot, you can expect anything – from an expensive science fiction thriller to a strong genre bash. Therefore, viewers who have not watched trailers and other promotional details may be very surprised. Yes, “Revived” turned out to be another project of Timur Bekmambetov, actively developing screenlife-cinema brand. So we will observe a terrible conspiracy and the resurrection of the dead, as if in the window of someone else’s laptop.
The intriguing concept of “Reborn”, alas, does not have a decent development. Firstly, there are no good actors in the videoconferencing windows – and this is a critical blunder. The screenlife format does not tolerate falsehood – all the antics, feigned nervousness and worried faces of the actors (they have a predominantly serial background – and not of the first grade) are too conspicuous, since the “interlocutor” is constantly in front of you, and close-up. Secondly, Joe Rechtman’s script raises big questions (so far, his portfolio has included only short films and work on episodes of little-known TV shows). Ideally, the fantastical assumptions in the plot should make what is happening interesting or provoke the viewer into interesting thoughts. But the high concept (what is it like to live in a world where the church can resurrect the dead?) turns out to be empty. Reborn is an embarrassingly straightforward conspiracy thriller that can’t be knocked down by a shocking denouement. Let’s try to do without spoilers, but let’s hint that there is no full-fledged catharsis here – the plot micro-twist in the finale does not change anything, and the invented world remains exactly the same as we find it at the beginning of the film.
From a visual point of view, there are also many questions about Reborn. People communicate in instant messengers, call up using webcams and google something on the Internet – and so on for almost an hour and a half. This is perhaps the most annoying. Screenlife, whatever one may say, constantly needs some kind of justification – the screenwriter and director must clearly demonstrate to the viewer why this story is packaged in this particular shell. “Remove from friends” (2015) frightened by the fact that evil spirits captured the space of the video conference, because from now on, not a physical, but a virtual location becomes a “bad place”. Profile (2018), which was filmed by Bekmambetov himself, illustrated the work of modern journalism, when you don’t have to go anywhere to get a sensation, but you can talk to a dangerous extremist without leaving your own apartment. The recent thriller “Missing” (2023) shows how an ordinary teenager is able to conduct a full-fledged investigation, hacking into other people’s accounts and carefully studying the browser history. Alas, “Reborn” is a screenlife on the minimum wage: director Yegor Baranov, who is responsible for the film and television series “Gogol”, almost does not use the existing potential. In other words, this film is easy to imagine outside the chosen format (perhaps even better). The only interesting find is the use of VR space (the main character holds services in a virtual church).
The obvious creative failure, however, should only spur both Bekmambetov and all others who work with desktop films. The dead are resurrecting en masse, the world is changing rapidly, and the living do not know what to do – why not start an expensive blockbuster? Screenlife has not yet gone beyond hermetic “room” thrillers – so I really want to hope that the authors and producers still dare to cross a young and experimental format with budgets and ambitions much higher.
In theaters April 27
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