A Gentle Creature review: a head-spinning odyssey into Russian despair

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa; Starring: Vasilina Makovsteva, Marina Kleshcheva, Lia Akhedzhakova, Valeriu Andruiuta, Boris Kamorzin, Sergei Kolesov. 18 cert, 143 mins

“Man is a wolf to his fellow man,” a taxi driver tells his female passenger, as their vehicle wends its way towards a monolithic prison block. “And how do wolves live? In packs. Got it?” 

She hasn’t – not yet – but she will soon enough. The new film from the Ukraine’s Sergei Loznitsa is a wildly ambitious, persistently jaw-dropping odyssey into Russia’s heartless darkness. It paints the country as a place where humans circle one another in predatory spirals, snapping at any sign of softness, while blocking any prospect of escape.

For a film that runs for a little over two and a quarter hours, its plot is almost comically simple. A woman tries to deliver a parcel: that’s it. There is no clear debt to the Dostoyevsky novella with which it shares its title apart from that title – and it’s a good one – but the great Russian novelist’s shadow keeps looming up from murky corners, along with similar debts to the savage 19th century satires of Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gogol.

Loznitsa’s film first screened in Cannes last May, and since then, with Russia creeping up the news agenda, it has only ripened like a great, stinking, cave-aged cheese. It is the living definition of Not For Everyone, and not a film I will soon forget.

The creature in question is a nameless woman, brilliantly played by Vasilina Makovsteva, who wants to get a package of food and clothing to her husband in prison. (His crime, if there even was one, is never mentioned.) She tried sending it by the postal service first, but when the film begins it has been returned with a 200-rouble handling fee, so she embarks on a journey by bus, train and taxi and finally on foot to the Siberian fortress in which he’s being detained.

The film unfolds in present-day Russia (and was shot in southeastern Latvia), but the prison town the woman arrives in feels stranded in a darker age. Like the village at the foot of Franz Kafka’s Castle, the whole place, from its police force to prostitution racket, is in the thrall of the institution at its core. The prison sustains the town: “We pray for it to thrive and prosper,” the taxi driver beams. As such, progress seems impossible, and the woman is stonewalled or diverted wherever she turns, especially by anyone who offers to help.

One of them is a guesthouse owner (Marina Kleshcheva) who takes the woman in when she is turned away at the prison door for some unknown bureaucratic infraction. She’s a beady-eyed, mouldering potato of a woman, and her guesthouse is the kind of establishment that wouldn’t be out of place in Borat’s Kazakhstan, with public groping, urination and free-flowing vodka and pickled cucumbers, while children clamber over the furniture like mice. 

Loznitsa’s vision of this world, shot by the great Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, is immersive and unnerving. Scenes splutter away like boiled-out pans of broth. Violence is everywhere: in unexplained brawls in the background, and snatches of conversations we overhear as the woman is buffeted between waiting rooms and passenger seats.

One anecdote ends with a man discovering a familiar hand in a mound of severed limbs, while someone in the post office contentedly reflects on how easy it would be for Russia “to blow up America with a single nuclear missile.” This is the national mood music.

Around half an hour from the end, things take a turn for the more overtly surreal, and there is also an almost unwatchably traumatic scene of sexual violence: two developments which some other critics back at Cannes found gratuitous. I didn’t at the time, and having revisited the film this week, still don’t: both are thrillingly, horrifically in keeping with the film’s whirlpool-like structure, which sucks you a little further downwards with every go-nowhere loop.

Loznitsa’s film looks out into the world and sees absurdity, so answers it with the absurd, and makes it feel like the only rational response.