Rating: ?
Dir: Diana Galimzyanova
Star: Ekaterina Dar, Elizaveta Shulyak, Lilit Karapetyan, Anton Medov
“You won’t understand a single thing.” Rarely has a tag-line been more accurate, for what the fuck did I just watch? No, really. Between here and Girls With Guns, I’ve now reviewed over five hundred movies on Tubi. But this is the first one I find myself clinically unable to grade. My ratings typically combine how much entertainment I obtained, and how successful a film was at achieving the director’s goals. The problem here is, I don’t know how to feel about this, and I certainly have no clue what Galimzyanova was trying to do. It’s an absurdist fairy-tale, with a suicidal Goth princess wandering through a largely demolished urban landscape, seeking the rope with which she intended to hang herself, which has been stolen from her by Prince Charming (Medov).
That barely scratches the surface of the weirdness here, or the parade of characters the princess encounters. A fairy godmother. Time-travelling werewolf detectives – played by drag queens, because why not? A zombie unicorn. Wizards. A walking mushroom. Oh, yeah: and the princess herself is three similar-looking but different actresses (Dar, Shulyak and Karapetyan). Why? Either as some kind of deep artistic statement, whose purpose escapes me, or because the original actress was unavailable, and Galimzyanova simply said “Fuck it,” and kept filming. That either explanation seems equally plausible, tells you a good deal about proceedings here. Throw in a non-existent fourth wall, with frequent references to the script, Facetime calls with God, a foul-mouthed Greek chorus of a viewer, an obsession with catching bus #54, and… Yeah: it’s like that.
Given a whopping seventeen ratings on the IMDb at the time of writing, the most astonishing thing is that any Western distributor watched it and thought, “Yeah, this needs to be seen by more people.” Especially since I suspect there is a lot of local flavour, and references across four different languages, that get lost in even the most dedicated of translation. Weirdest of all: we actually know the director, because she submitted a short, Murder Girl, in 2020 to FearCon – I only realized this because it gets referenced in the dialogue here, and I went, “Hang on…” It was very good. We actually gave it Best Foreign Short. It was thoroughly coherent, so I can only presume Galimzyanova did a metric fuck-ton of psychotropic drugs since.
Yet, y’know something? I kept watching, and did not fall asleep – unlike a certain other feature I watched this afternoon (no names, no pack drill). It’s complete nonsense – or probably more accurately, non-sense – and feels like a Russian adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, made on a budget of nine roubles by an energetic guild of Moscow cosplayers. Whether that’s an endorsement or a warning, is likely up to you. However, I note that Galimzyanova’s earlier feature, The Lightest Darkness, is also on Tubi. Described in her IMDb bio as, “the first ever female-directed Russian film noir with reverse chronology,” I must confess to a certain curiosity. So I guess Plan 9 can’t have been that bad. Probably not for this week though.