Ága

Half the score for half a movie. That was my logic after the end. The abuse of overly prolonged shots can ruin the whole immersion in to am otherwise beautiful and very unfamiliar surroundings. When each shot overstays its welcome, causes, as an observer, to start looking in to every detail and there is where the movie begins to crack. Shots are meticulously setup to only omit clear details on the background or actors not shown consistently through out multiple cuts. The end is undercut by questionable dialogue decisions and yet again incredibly... long... shots...

The imagery and the music are fantastic. The story line and the slow moving pace are done well. The acting is good. However, the biggest shortcoming of this film is the lack of any kind of camera movement, none. This was the single biggest mistake of this film. Some camera movement would have imbued the movie with emotional energy and would have made the beautiful shots come to life. At times I felt as if I was looking at landscape photography or animated stills. I sort of guess the idea but it doesn't work. Everything is frozen but the camera does not need to be.

Every frame speaks more than the Characters in this wonderful movie. Really a pleasure to watch.

The location reminds me to the landscapes around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia where I've been several.times during winter. As a landscape photographer myself I really liked the way the endless Siberian scenery was filmed. The 'moving' stills were great, snow and icefields, just the clouds in the sky etc. The shots in and above the diamond mine was the cherry on the cake for me. I liked it a lot!

Escaping urban life - offering a myriad of distractions, choices requiring decisions, consumerism as basic backbone to daily action, soundbites galore - I stepped into 2 hours of stillness, of vast emptiness, of sparsely spoken words. And those words ...such power!