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Before he became “famous” with his rather intelligent and humorous genre approach in 2020, with “Yellow Cat” and “Ulbolsyn”, Adilkhan Yerzhanov had directed a number of other movies, with “A Dark, Dark Man” featuring the same traits, but also being darker than his latest efforts. Let us take things from the beginning though.

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The introduction sets the tone of the whole movie in the most eloquent fashion. A boy has been killed in an aul (Kazakh village) and a police detective is examining the body in the most amateur way possible, behind a cornfield that seems like the perfect background for a Stephen King novel. After the “examination” is over, the policeman calls the local simpleton Pekuar, bribes him with candy to masturbate in a cup, and then proceeds on placing the semen on the dead body, framing the young man who barely understands what is going on.

Dark, dark humor and darker, darker themes prowl and glower through the desiccated cornfields and barren dustbowls of Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s bleakly dazzling police procedural “A Dark-Dark Man.” Premiering in San Sebastian and going on to play at the Busan Film Festival, this seventh feature from Yerzhanov, whose last film “The Gentle Indifference of the World” bowed in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, is a staggeringly controlled, slow-burn scorcher of a crime thriller.

The opening salvo is already not for the faint of heart: A police detective is examining the dead body of a small boy in an abandoned outbuilding beside a sinister cornfield. With offhand, practiced weariness, the detective doctors the scene, calling in slow-witted local misfit Pekuar (Teoman Khos), bribing him with chocolate bars to masturbate into a small cup, and carefully placing the semen on the dead body, thus framing the harmless, gormless Pekuar for the crime.

Sometimes it isn’t enough to simply portray the type of eternal love that Shakespeare wrote about in Romeo and Juliet. Watching two star-crossed lovers attempt to fight the injustices of this world to be together, only to sacrifice themselves, can still ring hollow because it hinges upon the naiveté of children not looking for another solution regardless of whether the result would be the same. To take the poison is to admit defeat against external forces that are too strong to fight. Love therefore becomes our sole reason to exist once everything else is shown to be false. Until then we still possess hope and the possibility of improving our circumstances so that our love may be fostered beyond a fleeting fantasy.

Love becomes the byproduct of futility, the single tangible concept we can hug when everything crumbles around us. Love doesn’t therefore kill; it sustains when the rest burns.