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An emotional film, a great character.. One of those rare rare movies you really want to see how it turns out for the boy. Something Western cinematography cannot do anymore.

The first two opening sequences are enough to watch to get a representation of the mediocrity of a movie. You can smell rotten fish from the first minutes.

A leading actor Sasha Petrov is thirty years old and looks thirty-five, so when he is represented to us as a young student it is simply implausible. "A junkhead who deals drugs living with his mom" that I would believe. And it's just the start.

The lack of decent introduction of an antagonist played by another nohow actor Ivan Yankovsky leaves the same feeling of being tricked. The whole "night club sequence" looks both poorly acted and overplayed (depends on what actor you are looking at). Yes, it may happen in an up to the neck corrupted country as it was shown - fast and simple. But it doesn't mean that we have to watch it on the screen the same way, without any explanation or backstory or a clue in a simple gesture made by a character in a one tiny few seconds scene before the "plot twist".

And after the ten and a half minutes of pretending-to-be-a-movie, we get an undeservedly pretentious cut with a title of a movie. Like their saying "yes, it can and will be worse"...

What an amazing movie. Intense, bleak and very sad. Definitely not a movie for everyone. Leaves you thinking about a lot of things

9/10.

I never read the book. Maybe that's why I really enjoyed the movie. It's maybe the best Russian movie I saw in the last several years.

A good insight on the hopeless state of Russian modern society. Integrity and good can be found only in interpersonal relations, not in social institutions which are totally corrupted. The movie is a little bit slow, but still catching.