Kalak

Kalak is not for a casual viewer and provides a diesel locomotive type treatment. Once you lock in keys and levers, system needs to build up the pressure. Only then will one be able to start the main engine. That is just the brief version. There are the switches to flip, turnkeys to hold, systems to program. All part of the course, expected, but the fine details always implementation specific.

While the locomotive offers the heavy lifting, it comes with its downsides. It is not a ride for thrills, a fun roller coaster, that one hops in but a machine that is expected to endure harsh conditions and constant punishment.

The plot and the essence of this movie is so well abbreviated in the summary, that repeating it here is no use.

Like older locomotives, this one also pushes out heavy black smoke when cylinders start compressing, but the engine is yet too cold to run by its own power. The movie attempts shock its audience, score and scuff, but in the modern world that is nothing new. It provides no value. It adds nothing. Even if the movie would be set in an alternative universe where there is no filth, the viewer has not yet immersed into it.

If diesel oils are toxic, so are the depicted characters. The tone is very depressing and one has to ask, why make such a movie? Is this what the cinema is supposed to be, a cocktail of abuse and misuse? The canvas could have been painted with anything. This is also reflected by the camera as well. Set in a scenic and remote place, yet, most of the shots happen inside confined spaces. Walls erected by the man and the sun replaced by florescent lamps filled with poisonous mercury vapor.

(Some nice Scandinavian furniture is present, though, so perhaps that is the glimmering hope.)

Once the circle is complete, there have been mostly actions with little consequences. The same patterns repeated, forgiven by others, all done by expecting (hoping) for an alternative result. But as long there is fuel and enough momentum left for the piston to compress the fuel-air mixture, it ignites and the diesel cycle repeats itself, unchanged.

Unless some force breaks down the engine or some of its components, of course.