Loveless
Incessantly bleak, chilling, unflinching and suffocating. It may not surprise you to know that this movie is Russian. Shards of longing, loss and even (very rarely) joy, have been collected in this evidence locker of a film. Occasionally, the bleakness is broken by the odd snowflake of humour or happiness, but even that melts to nothing and is lost within the lake of dreary despair that is Loveless.
That doesn’t mean to say that this is a bad film, because it isn’t. But if you were hoping for a relaxing night out, then this movie about a divorcing couple forced to work together during their son’s disappearance may not be for you. Despite that, aspects of the film remain downright stunning and director Andrey Zvyagintsev pulls beauty out of the most unremarkable of situations. He delivers a masterclass in unsettling cinema, from the sinister and foreboding trees in the opening sequence, to finding the majesty in derelict and dilapidated buildings, every scene is heaped with estrangement and is guaranteed to entrance you at every turn of its neo-noir journey.
It dissects a world with the clinical precision of an autopsy and reveals how atrocities are born from apathy. It slyly slips in snippets of political corruption, or everyday moments of intolerance and societal pressures, but does so insidiously, focusing on the minute details of a Ukraine invasion news bulletin or a passing comment about military conscription. Rather than tackling the root of the problem head-on, it follows the day-to-day side-effects.
Not since the painstaking police procedural series The Killing, has the banality and infuriating dead-ends, eternal bureaucracy and dashed hopes of a missing persons case been combed over in such torturous detail. With the impartiality that only that best documentaries can lay claim to, there is nothing preachy here, you are left in the moral agony of having to decide how much of the neglect of Alyosha is the fault of his parents or of the world he was born into. Its cruellest trick is forcing you to sympathise with every lurch and jilt of the lives of Alyosha’s narcissistic parents Zhenya and Boris (played magnificently by Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin). The mistakes and trials of its protagonists pierce you like icicles and make you wish you could reach through the screen and shake some sense into them.
You will not love this film. It will make you miserable and critical of humanity’s every flaw. Zvyagintsev seems to get sadistic pleasure from offering you almost zero emotional pay-off for you invested time, giving all stick and no carrot. Loveless baits you with a happily-ever-after, then reels you in and leaves you flapping around and gasping in an existential bucket.
You probably won’t even enjoy it, or at least not in the sense of getting any sort of satisfaction or catharsis or resolution whatsoever from beginning to end. Loveless is a story that really sticks in your teeth, it is ingenious, haunting and beautiful, as cagey and unfeeling as the characters it follows, but it will leave you cold and a little dead inside and will fill you with an uncontrollable desire to walk through Siberian landscapes in a trench coat and smoke endless cigarettes.
7/10
