Look don’t die – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
Online cinema “Evie” released “Frozen”. This is the first serial work of the young Kazakh classic Adilkhan Yerzhanov, but not the first attempt to transplant Scandinavian noir onto Russian soil. There were already “Storm” by Boris Khlebnikov and “Dead Lake” by Roman Prygunov. It seems that Yerzhanov’s approach to the problem turned out to be too cinephilic.
The dark prologue of this winter story is dominated by the spirit of “doomerstvo” – a typical Russian version of nihilism that has grown on the yeast of a gloomy new wave and social hopelessness in provincial short films. A gloomy man (Artem Bystrov) first dismembers someone’s body in his apartment, and then saves the wife and child of his crazy doctor friend. This friend drank himself to the pen and grabbed his gun, but Zhenya Rudin, that’s the name of our hero, is not a timid dozen – he not only pokes corpses with a knife, but also works as an opera. And not just anywhere, but in the harsh Kostomuksha, where the dark windows of snow-covered panels rest against the horror of the forest belt.
Will run for several years. His wife has gone to the opera, the abusive doctor has given up alcohol, but the policeman’s depression has only worsened – jealous, withdrawn, very cool in his red Alaska jacket open and black glasses, he investigates cruel crimes and already hardly distinguishes real life from dissecting one. And how can you tell when there are stiffened corpses here and there. Rudin gives his stepson a tank model for his birthday, he likes to threaten friends and maim suspects. And soon he gets a good reason to go off the rails completely – on the outskirts of the city they find the frozen body of a woman, the same wife he once saved. This murder is the first of a series of sophisticated atrocities that the opera will have to investigate together with the blond partner Masha (Lena Tronina).
That a maniac is operating in Kostomuksha is already clear from the screensaver of “Frozen”, in which a variety of objects of reality are effectively frozen. Social networks call the murderer Freezer: dressed in a terrible Christmas mask and jacket of the local Karhu hockey team, he exposes the victims and watches how their defenseless bodies cool in the cold, and sometimes simply douses the already dead with liquid nitrogen. It would seem that by the third corpse in a small but important factory town (next to Kostomuksha, a giant quarry and Severstal mining and processing plant) a special investigative team from the center should have appeared, but the author of this serial detective story is Kazakhstani director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, for a movie in which isolation is almost always a given, a prerequisite for the plot, so that local authorities have to cope on their own.
The heroes commenting on the macabra on the screen are mainly in the spirit of “oh, this Kostomuksha!”: they say, what did you want when we had it differently? But it will be difficult to reproach the authors of Frozen with some kind of demonization of Karelian life – Kostomuksha Yerzhanova is nothing like reality. No matter how the script glorifies the local frosts, the main characters go without hats, scarves and gloves. Mom will not scold, this is a movie. This city looks like a conditional Yerzhanovsky placed in Scandinavian noir aul Karatas, where the action of almost every of his films has so far unfolded. How different Karatas can look, the Russian audience had a chance to see this year already twice – when the thriller “Storm” and the western “Goliath” were released in our rental. Just like Yerzhanovsky’s Karatas is just a dot on the map of Kazakhstan, so his Kostomuksha is just an ideal nowhere in the middle of an icy void. There is one police station run by the weary Kirill Polukhin, one mortuary and one cemetery with a funeral home (the colorful hero Semyon Strugacheva runs it), one car service where the mechanic Sidorov (Yevgeny Sannikov, crippled by the zone) works, one psychiatrist (Lukerya Ilyashenko ironically sexualizes the profession) , as well as one cafe, in which, as a cinephilic joke, two movie posters flaunt – “The Lady Disappears” and “In case of murder, dial” M “”. Despite this, closer to the final, Yerzhanov will give an unequivocal hello to completely different Hitchcock films. In the same the soundtrack also blows a cinephile tune, persistently referring to the filmography of John Carpenter.
Everything is good with the atmosphere in Frozen. You can admire not only the northern lights and deep snowdrifts, but also the routine cruelty of both law enforcement officers and local residents who habitually survive in an uninhabitable environment. Everything is good with Yerzhanov’s directorial ability to combine typical genre clichés (for example, a pathologist constantly chewing during autopsies) with daring finds. This is an effective movie, but the longer it goes on, the more the feeling grows that an even greater effect could be achieved if its characters, who completely moved from their panels to the world of Scandinavian noir, would speak in some exotic language (that would exactly smoothed out the roughness of the script and acting), and the viewer did not suffer, comparing his own experience of real life with what he saw on the screen and not asking the question: what are the locals concerned about besides hockey and sophisticated murders?
Watch: “Evie”
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
