A Gentle Creature – Krotkaya (2017)

Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa | 143 minutes | drama | Actors: Vasilina Makovtseva, Valeriu Andriutã, Liya Akhedzhakova, Sergey Kolesov, Boris Kamorzin, Viktor Nemets, Marina Kleshcheva

The viewer gets to know little about the gentle creature from the title of ‘A Gentle Creature’ (2017). Pretty much nothing, really, except that she’s a passive, taciturn woman living somewhere in rural Russia who gets back the package of provisions she sent to her husband in prison. We do not find out why that package is returned, nor does the woman who therefore leaves for the prison to deliver the package herself. What follows is a nightmarish journey through a world that director Sergei Loznitsa simply describes as ‘hell’.

That hell consists of gray villages, ugly, complaining people, and endless rows. Especially a lot of rows. In front of the post office counter, in front of the bus, in the train station, in prison. Queues in waiting rooms filled to the brim with complaining, angry, sad, crazy, and sad people. People who tell all kinds of paranoid and horrific stories, about murders and rapes. Or sing nostalgic songs from a time long gone, a romantic Russia that no longer exists; revolution, communism, and completely nonsensical fantasies about Russian supremacy are never far away in this Russia where, according to Sergei Loznitsa, no one is innocent and everyone has an interest in a fully dehumanized society.

This world of endless waiting for an answer that never comes, be it from the authorities, the underworld, the human rights movement, or the bluster of everyone else, is not only shown to us, but Loznitsa makes us feel it through the painfully slow pace in which the picturesque images, often filled to the brim with all sorts of figures that have walked straight out of a painting by Jheronimus Bosch, sometimes appear incoherently.

A road movie that doesn’t get shot. And yet, all this does not make ‘A Gentle Creature’ a burden to watch, on the contrary, the misery is above all absurd, tragic but also comical. Beautifully filmed and masterfully staged. ‘A Gentle Creature’ is a pleasant torment.