Rating: C
Dir: Nikola Petrovic
Star: Andrew Howard, Philip Brodie, Kamka Tocinovski, Joakim Tasic
I wondered why I wasn’t able to find anything about this film when searching, and was getting a lot of Harry Potter sites. Then I realized my phone had helpfully changed the film’s title to “mudblood”. Damn you, auto-correct. To be clear, there is not much overlap, and fans of a certain young wizard will not find much here, though I guess the unexpected revelation of dark arts and family secrets do play a part in both. The innocent here is Paul (Brodie), a Serbian who has spent much of his life in London. He returns to take ownership of his inheritance, the family home in a small village, which reunites him with his brother, Jakov (Howard).
Tensions are immediately high, with Jakov and his family fearing Paul will evict them. Meanwhile, the relatively urbane Paul is ill-suited to rural life, despite well-intentioned efforts to fit in, by helping around the farm. It doesn’t help that certain old religions have not died out, the locals still practicing certain ritual around a stone cairn (top, which Chris immediately named “A Serbian Dildo”). There are many whispered references to the return of “Nav”, whatever he, she or it might be. Let me help you there, because the film won’t. It’s the word used for the souls of the departed, watched over by Veles, the god of the dead. He gets hailed a lot too, in a phrase Paul amusingly misinterprets as the local version of bon appetit.
I 
won’t explain any further. Not out of a desire to avoid spoilers, so much as because… I honestly couldn’t tell you what unfolded in the second half of the film. There’s a point where someone commits suicide, and after that, everything becomes inexorably more unhinged. The film shifts from Paul’s perspective to that of Jakov, but there’s a lot happening that suggests he may be an unreliable narrator, and/or there’s something radically different going on. For example, we see Paul’s arrival at the house half a dozen times in quick succession, shot from slightly different angles and captioned “springtime one” through “springtime six”. So, is Paul a soul of the departed, repeatedly returning home?
I am unable to comment further. At one point, the boyfriend of Jakov’s daughter turns up and yells at him, “Tell him you fucking pussy! Let him know the truth!” To be frank, somebody should have got in the face of the film-makers here, and suggested much the same thing. The performances are good, particularly Howard, who is brilliant as a man whose entire life is collapsing around him. The audio work is also particularly worthy of praise, combining ethnic music with sound effects to good result. Really, all that’s missing to make this a good movie is the half-baked script. The other elements, especially the actors, deserve better than the underwhelming hints and suggestions offered, in lieu of an intelligible story.
The film is available now on Amazon Prime.