Description

A onetime ace reporter, young Muscovite Marina is trying to quit the game. A failed romance with her editor had her looking for an exit even before tragedy struck in the form of a hostage-taking, ending in a police shooting that Marina witnesses so closely that she is caught in the spray of blood. Most disturbing is that once you take away the fact that he was naked and wielding a shotgun, the hostage-taker was speaking a surprising amount of sense, and yet nobody even made the attempt to end things peaceably. This is the end of the line for Marina. Old beyond her years and sick of human company, she would seemingly like nothing more than to spend her days in the bottle, but things aren’t that simple. Playing the old friendship card, her ex-lover/ex-editor enlists Marina’s help for one final job. A psychopathic, sexually predatory serial killer is up for sentencing and they want Marina to interview him before final word comes down. She grudgingly agrees, but on the morning she is due to meet with him, the killer escapes and Marina is swept up in the pursuit, eventually becoming lost with a lone police investigator in an abandoned dacha town now populated only by a handful of society’s outcasts – criminals, degenerates and predators all. Her goal now largely forgotten. Marina must simply survive …

From the stunning opening sequence onward, one thing is abundantly clear: director Denis Neimand has an exceptional eye. The film is beautifully shot, tension expertly manipulated, and Neimand includes a handful of excellent action set pieces. This is clearly the work of a man who knows his way around a camera. Helping things along are a strong cast and if the film feels a little familiar in the middle act, it is only to set up the slyly subversive ending.

—Todd Brown

Website

http://www.zhestfilm.ru/english.html

Credits

Director: Denis Neimand
Screenplay: Konstantin Murzenko
Cast: Yelena Babenko, Mikhail Yefremov, Igor Lifanov, Anatoli Belyj, Vyachaslav Razbegayev
Producers: Joseph Bakshiev
Distributor: MB Productions, Central Partnership