Here we have another modern Russian film and for once it isn’t one by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, this one is as visually different as you can get from Zvyagintsev’s style due to its warm, rich and bright color palette. But don’t be mistaken, as we have come to expect from the tortured Russian psyche, this is just as searing and incisive a critique of contemporary Russian society as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre.

A woman, known even in the credits only as a gentle woman, lives alone with her dog in a rural area. At the post office, she learns that a parcel that she has sent to her husband who is in prison has been returned. She tries to find out the reason it has been returned but fails. So she takes some time off work to go to the prison herself. At the train station she is rudely searched by the guards who suspect her of being a terrorist. Once she arrives in town, the taxi driver explains that the whole town’s economy depends on the prison and the people in it are there for their own good. At the prison itself, she needs to pay money to get some forms to fill out but when she submits them is told that they can’t help her. The prison authorities won’t even acknowledge whether or not her husband is inside. Random people offer to help such a portly woman who offers her a place to stay saying that it will be cheaper than the local hotel. A shady fixer claims that he can set her up with someone connected and powerful. But at every turn she is disappointed and it is evident that everyone is just trying to take advantage of her.

As befits her nickname the main character is quiet and mostly passive. She does, as my wife notes, have a rather sulky face and is appropriately cynical at everyone but being an ordinary, powerless person seems to have no choice but to be persistent and insistent. The warm and bright colors and even the cheery songs sung by various character only highlight the absurdity and hopelessness of our heroine’s plight. This is perfectly exemplified by the taxi driver’s frank admission that the whole town exists only to extract the maximum amount of economic rent possible from visitors to the prison, preying on their desperate need to meet or even just find out what happened to their loved ones. Every character that she meets have their own sob story which they are eager to tell and none show any compassion for other people. Even the main character never seems to show any compassion for the sad stories that others recount to her, merely listening to them impassively as if this is how she expects the world to be. Leave it to the Russians to once again outdo everyone else at being depressing.

The film never lays out explicitly what is really going on, but anyone with some knowledge of Russian contemporary events can read between the lines. The director’s previous body of work offers copious clues as well. The implication is that the prisoners are being exploited to become soldiers in Russia’s covert foreign wars and even when they die the government can’t acknowledge them as officially the Russian military isn’t involved. A character sings about Maidan and seems to be talking about Siberia but the real reference is to the central square of Kiev in Ukraine and the Orange Revolution that kicked off there. The ending sequence goes all the way into absurdist fantasy. There are probably a lot of references there that I didn’t get but we get the director’s intent of skewering Russian hypocrisy and deception well enough.

I was surprised to see that this film has a very low Rotten Tomatoes rating, probably because it’s a bit too difficult to grasp. One interesting complaint is that the film appears to condemn both the Russian authorities and the Russian populace. But that is a valid form of expression for an artist who sees no hope anywhere for Russia. Regardless, I think that this is a brutal. powerful film that deserves greater acknowledgment.