A Gentle Creature

When I first read the premise of this movie (the returned package) I wasn't sure if this would be a horror movie or not.

What I got is decidedly not a horror movie but it is indeed terrifying in its own way.

An ineffably strange and atmospheric odyssey of one woman through a prison town, meeting vivid character after vivid character, each cartoonish in their own way yet at once, almost too real, like a sort of modern day urban Alice in Wonderland.

Valentina Makovtseva plays this unfortunate wife with a quite, smouldering intensity that makes me sure I would recognise her in anything else I see. Even in her resting face she is hard to forget. The candid, episodic narrative tells a story of modern Russia in the numerous people that make it up; a world composed of those desperately trying to make the best of a system that no one seems to have seen coming and those who are part of the system and where the petty criminals and the law enforcement are alike in brutality and apathy.

Although it is not a horror movie, it is envisioned exactly as one should be: the seductive cinematography, the candid angles, the way it always lingers on action even when the scene is effectively at its close; I hope the director of this does direct a horror one day. No need to write it, just give a good script their treatment.

This movie is sort of like a Russian turnip. Not sweet and definitely unsavoury, but on some level I suspect its good for you. Though it's never aggressive, it never relents, it takes no short cuts yet it never drags. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that I don't think I'll ever forget.