Well, I've been sitting on this one for ages, and now's as good a time as any to drag this weird little flick into the light. Plus, with Amok, I've hit the unholy trinity mark of 300 reviews on IMDb. Kinda wild.
First off, let's give it up for Kote Marjanishvili, the madman behind this operation - a director who deserves way more love than history gave him. He's right up there with my other silent-era obsessions: Germaine Dulac's dreamy spirals, Esfir Shub's razor-sharp montages, Daisuke Itô's restless samurai energy, László Moholy-Nagy's geometric hallucinations, Lois Weber's social conscience, Wancang Bu's cross-cultural experiments, Sidney Peterson's avant-garde pranks, Juan Bustillo Oro's Mexican gothic, Hans Steinhoff's expressionist grit, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's poetic landscapes, Phil Goldstone's forgotten gems, Vladimir Gardin's revolutionary fervor, Joris Ivens' documentary eye, Felix E. Feist's Hollywood oddities, Tancred Ibsen's Nordic chill, Rochus Gliese's shadowplay, Alexander Alexeieff's pinboard animations, Claire Parker's light experiments, Willard Maas's erotic surrealism, and Franciszka and Stefan Themerson's philosophical playfulness.
And because I can't help myself, let's pour one out for the usual suspects too - because by no means are they unknown names to die-hard fans of silent era films: Man Ray's rayographs, Lev Kuleshov's editing experiments, Paul Wegener's golem nightmares, Kenneth MacPherson's queer cinema, Mauritz Stiller's Scandinavian cool, Abel Gance's triptych madness, Tomu Uchida's wandering samurai, Erich von Stroheim's obsessive detail, Francesco Bertolini's Dantean visions, Giuseppe de Liguoro's historical epics, Adolfo Padovan's Venetian shadows, Victor Halperin's voodoo horror, Gregory La Cava's social satire, Wladyslaw Starewicz's insect puppets, Robert Reinert's opium dreams, Arthur Robison's psychological thrillers, Eugene Deslaw's abstract rhythms, F. W. Murnau's moving cameras, Teinosuke Kinugasa's cross-dressing ghosts, Paul Wege's criminal underworlds, Carl Theodor Dreyer's spiritual torment, Robert Wiene's cabinet of horrors, Hans Richter's Dadaist chaos, Georges Méliès' magic tricks, Mikhail Kalatozov's Georgian poetry, and Benjamin Christensen's witch hunts.
Now, to the main event: Amok takes Stefan Zweig's short story and turns it into a drama with some interesting themes, adding avant-garde elements. We've got Aleksandre Imedashvili as a European doctor rotting away in what might as well be British India (though the film never says it outright), drowning in rotgut and opium. Then we have the amazing Nato Vachnadze (Marjanishvili's regular muse) as a white woman begging for an abortion - which he agrees to provide... in exchange for sex. The woman leaves, and that's when the real trip begins.
What follows is a hallucinogenic, guilt-ridden spiral - chases, paranoia, Freudian nightmares, and avant-garde editing that feels like it was beamed in from the future. Marjanishvili doesn't just adapt Zweig's story; he mutates it, warping reality until you can't tell what's real and what's just the doctor's opium-addled brain collapsing in on itself. He embraces surrealism like a lover, letting it slither and shapeshift through psychic walls with editing so far ahead of its time it's downright unsettling. This doc's mind unravels in a full-blown, hallucinogenic, passion-fuelled freefall into madness. He's caught in his own vice, blind to the wreckage until it's too late.
And that editing is the major standout, It plays like a 1920s proto-Lynchian nightmare, leaving you as disoriented as its opium-addled protagonist - decades ahead of its time. I think audiences back then might have recoiled, condemning it to the dustbin of history. It faded, forgotten. But hopefully this film will keep finding the audience it truly deserves.
