Rating: C
Dir: Stepan Burnashev
Star: Fedot Lvov, Ekaterina Khoyutanova, Ivan Popov, Vladislav Portnyagin
The Sakha Republic in Russia is remote, extremely cold and barely populated. It’s almost 1.2 million square miles – the biggest country subdivision in the world – comfortably more than four times the size of the United Kingdom, but with a population under one million. As for weather, it’s where the second- and third-coldest temperatures ever recorded in the Northern hemisphere took place, a mere -67.8 C. So, yeah. It’s a challenging environment to put it mildly, and the film doesn’t need to do the “no signal” thing. [Though it does still do the, “They’re going to put up a cellphone tower eventually, so that’ll be nice” thing] “We don’t live here, we survive,” says Gosha (Lvov), the man at the centre of proceedings.
He’s a driver, who is making deliveries to the remotest corner of Sakha. It helps that he has family at the destination, though his relationships there seem somewhat strained. Gosha also has a secondary business, trafficking hooch of dubious quality to the locals. They desperately need it, because “getting cirrhosis of the liver” appears to be the main leisure pursuit available to them. Got no money? Hey, maybe Gosha will accept a reindeer carcass in exchange for some bottles of his vodka-like substance. However, this slice of Russian social drama gets rudely upended when Gosha is on the way back and gets a flat. Repairing it by the side of the road, his jack fails, crushing his hand beneath the wheel (top).
Ever wanted to watch a Russian man screaming in agony for twenty-five minutes? If so, this movie is for you. Because that’s exactly what it delivers. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. Just a slight one though, with relief coming only as Gosha drifts in and out of consciousness, hallucinating more pleasant times and alternative scenarios. You know help isn’t coming. You know there’s no easy escape for him. You may well have seen, or at least are aware of, the not-dissimilar 127 Hours. If so, you can probably figure out that some difficult decisions are coming for Gosha. Not least because there’s no way he can wait around and see if anyone turns up. He’ll be dead from exposure within hours.
However, outside of those twenty-five minutes – and Lvov certainly sells things with admirable enthusiasm – this isn’t particularly… Well, I can’t really use “fun”, given the scenario, but I would have settled for “interesting.” Lob in a passing wolf or polar bear, maybe. I’d even have taken more hallucinations, such as a relative popping by to chat. Instead, once those difficult decisions have been made, the film kinda loses interest in its own central character, and doesn’t know what to do with Gosha. Burnashev has an admirable fondness for long takes, right from the opening where we learn about Gosha’s murky reputation among the drivers. But it never manages to build much on this, and while supposedly based on a true story, I was left as cold as the Sakhan landscape.