Review of the film “Niche” by Anton Ermolin

Anton Ermolin’s directorial debut “Niche” is being released – a film-journey through the space of a dream, which David Lynch could have made if he had settled in a post-Soviet small-sized apartment with an indispensable carpet on the wall. Tells Julia Shagelman.

Carpets are taking over the space of Russian auteur cinema. Less than three weeks ago, Roman Mikhailov’s “October Holiday” was released, where the secrets of cinema as an instrument of mass hypnosis, if not the secrets of existence in general, were encrypted in the patterns of Soviet carpets. Now debutant Anton Ermolin is on the screens with a film produced by Alexei Uchitel, which begins with a carpet and ends with a carpet. Perhaps this is due to the fact that directors, like many children in our country, fell asleep under a carpet hanging on the wall, and the intricacies of woolen threads smoothly flowed into the fantastic matter of their dreams. Or maybe they just think it’s beautiful.

Carpets are also a way of earning money for the wife of the main character of “Nisha” Vyacheslav (Vladimir Svirsky) Maryam (Elena Nikolaeva). She weaves them to order in her spare time from working as a cinema controller. One day she receives a call from a mysterious man in a coat (Sergei Gilev) with a request to make a carpet with her own portrait and at first refuses, but then gets to work anyway. The stranger, flashing a dark shadow in the snow-covered courtyard, disappears, only to later reappear in Vyacheslav’s life as either a messenger of some mysterious forces, or a guide to the other side of reality.

Vyacheslav himself is an engineer by education, a furniture deliverer by occupation, and a psychic by vocation. With the help of dowsing frames, he collects negative energy in clients’ apartments, analyzes the biofields of passers-by (or even their dogs) while standing in a subway passage, and charges glass jars – not even with water, like the ever-memorable Alan Chumak, but completely empty ones. Naturally, his superiors and his wife’s relatives, who appear later, consider him not quite sane and certainly not adapted to normal life.

But Slava and Maryam have their own lives, quite harmonious, in which they see the same dreams and receive signals from invisible energy spheres. Everything matters here: the chronicle of Soviet party congresses and demonstrations, going on in front of empty theaters in the cinema where Maryam works, the casual remark of her boss that there are moths in the chairs, the reasoning of fellow security guard Vyacheslav (Mikhail Troinik) about conspiracy theories, the collapse The USSR and the emergence of a new state entity on its ruins (“That country no longer exists, but the people remain!”), text messages of one letter arriving on the hero’s phone, a sudden telegram “Maykop – Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.”

This review password finally opens the way for Vyacheslav to his true destiny. Continuing the game of cities, he rushes to Yoshkar-Ola, admonished by a man in a coat: there he will meet with the one who controls everything, and he must appear for it in parade, in a suit. Finding himself in the Mari capital, built up with fake copies of the Kremlin, Neuschwanstein and the Doge’s Palace (in this city, as in the film itself, absolutely nothing is what it seems), he falls into another carpeted rabbit hole and finally completes his transformation, which yours, Gregor Samsa. True, unlike Kafka’s hero, Vyacheslav does not suffer at all from his new insect essence, on the contrary, something, and the carpets in the vastness of the ghostly country are enough not only for the short century of one moth, but also for a much, much longer period.