Sergei and Eurydice

Andrey Libenson’s film “Night Mode”, a project of the KION online cinema, is coming to the big screens. The penitentiary variation on the theme of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice unexpectedly pleasantly surprised Mikhail Trofimenkov.

The plot of the film inspired hopes for the worst. Judge for yourself. The sloppy bachelor party that the young photographer Roma (Pavel Tabakov) started on the eve of the wedding with his hipster friends ended with a hungover awakening among a mountain of corpses. Three boys, plus a “random heifer”, stabbed to death or beaten to death by Romin’s camera, were spread around Roma in various poses. The police are breaking in the door of the cottage, and Andrey Merzlikin’s infernal character looms in the window, uttering an equally infernal truth: “This is your nightmare.”

The mystical Sergei (Merzlikin) is generally the champion of the film in terms of the number of aphoristic statements. “You’d better wake up,” he advises Roma, who has been sealed for 25 years in a colony of the strictest regime, where the authorities press him and recruit him as informers, and colorful cellmates Filin (Aleksey Trufanov) and Kadyk (Anton Makukha) are a nightmare. “Call me a Teacher, or something,” he certifies himself, demonstrating to Roma the art of opening any doors to any reality by drawing something like pentagrams on them. And the phrase “We work together” is pronounced with the fighting intonation of a warrior-internationalist, even though it sounds not in the yellow Syrian, for example, sands, but in the scarlet sands of Hades.

Yes, initially the film seems to be a fierce nonsense, the neo-Gulag “Matrix”. A concentration camp fantasy mixed with penitentiary bullshit and fashionable post-post-cyberpunk motifs. And, of course, “Night Watch”, with which the name of the film by Andrei Libenson, previously known only as the author of serials, clearly rhymes.

In addition, it is not difficult to figure out the main villain, guilty of both the genocide of young okhlamons, and the unjust condemnation of Roma, and even a lot of things. Well, would an honest person walk around the screen in a mustard-colored coat, red tie and glasses. Still wear a hat! However, it gradually turns out that with the “Night Mode” everything is far from being so simple, nonsense takes on quite intelligible plot and, I’m not afraid of this word, archetypal outlines.

It seems that Russian cinema suddenly learned how to work on the territory of hard science fiction. “Night Mode” is the third remarkable genre film in a year after Valery Fokin’s philosophical dystopia “Petropolis”, which is still in vain looking for its distributor, and Igor Voloshin’s frenzied surrealistic sadomaso “Obsessed”. The peculiarity of the “Night Mode” is that this is far from the first, but, of course, the original interpretation of the ancient Greek myth of the rhapsode Orpheus, descending into hell for his beloved wife Eurydice.

In Jean Cocteau’s classic and also modernized version of Orpheus (1950), the title character was a bohemian poet. According to Libenson, Orpheus-Sergey is also an artist, a killer of doctors responsible for the death of his Eurydice, working in the zone as an electrician and at the same time wandering through people’s dreams. He differs from the classical Orpheus only in that he, weighed down by the sin of murder, needs an innocent intermediary capable of crossing the border of hell.

Hell, on the other hand, has two, if not three – given the “real reality” based on lies and violence – levels. The first level is a zone with its press huts, provocations, quiet sadistic reprisals in the industrial zone, the preparation of cellmates as living “canned food” in case of escape, fake digs and a strange doctor who treats prisoners with no less strange sweets.

The second level is a riot of surreal design. Some kind of mummies with dials in place of what should have been a face, offering in exchange for a lifetime of a client penetration into the dreams of his antagonists. Scarlet mountains above scarlet rivers, among which the petrified killers froze. In short, the bad dreams embodied by Libenson are moderately elegant, moderately disgusting. But for one single image – the cut off tongue of a snitch that lives its own life – “Night Mode” deserves a prize at any festival of fantastic films: both an excellent special effect and a social metaphor.