A Gentle Creature

A thought provocative, very engrossing film. Though it is slow & boring at times, it rewards the viewer in the end. Hats off to the director.

Good acting, good screenplay, minimal dialogues. I will cherish this film for many years.

A Not To Be Missed film.

When I first read the premise of this movie (the returned package) I wasn't sure if this would be a horror movie or not.

What I got is decidedly not a horror movie but it is indeed terrifying in its own way.

An ineffably strange and atmospheric odyssey of one woman through a prison town, meeting vivid character after vivid character, each cartoonish in their own way yet at once, almost too real, like a sort of modern day urban Alice in Wonderland.

Valentina Makovtseva plays this unfortunate wife with a quite, smouldering intensity that makes me sure I would recognise her in anything else I see. Even in her resting face she is hard to forget. The candid, episodic narrative tells a story of modern Russia in the numerous people that make it up; a world composed of those desperately trying to make the best of a system that no one seems to have seen coming and those who are part of the system and where the petty criminals and the law enforcement are alike in brutality and apathy.

Although it is not a horror movie, it is envisioned exactly as one should be: the seductive cinematography, the candid angles, the way it always lingers on action even when the scene is effectively at its close; I hope the director of this does direct a horror one day. No need to write it, just give a good script their treatment.

This movie is sort of like a Russian turnip. Not sweet and definitely unsavoury, but on some level I suspect its good for you. Though it's never aggressive, it never relents, it takes no short cuts yet it never drags. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that I don't think I'll ever forget.

'A gentle creature' defies categorisation, it is rich with both metaphor and realism. A Russian woman, depicted as 'gentle', searches for an explanation about the seeming disappearance of her husband who should still be in a Siberian prison. Her emotion during this journey is blunted and she gradually weakens further from lack of sleep and tiredness, until she is entirely and completely vulnerable. A courageous woman, she experiences the most extreme bureaucracy and corruption, the type that is the stuff of nightmares. This is masterfully depicted throughout, in scenes that no Hollywood movie is able to match. The viewer feels entrapped like the woman, and her emotional bluntness is understood completely.

Described by other reviewers as bleak, I found the dark mood of this story somewhat balanced by the humanity shown by others, strangers to the woman, who also suffer similar if not worse dilemmas than the woman. Her journey is her own, solitary and with great risk, but she is never invisible to others. Life in this Siberian town may be cold and harsh, but is life in any modern city any less warm?

I never read Dostoyevsky's short story that inspired the 2h20 film, so I'm not sure if the written story also reveals a large country where corruption is the dominating rule. If you are the usual movie fan, be prepared for long quite shots, raw characters, sophisticated narrative and humor. The story takes the viewer through a Kafkaesque and labyrinthine sequence of incidents and misfortunes where promises are broken and hope lives faraway. I guess it's all about Putin's Russia but also about Czar's and Stalin's nation. I like the movie but some creative solutions are a bit excessive.

This incredible movie was hard to watch but it was well worth it. The original story of Fyodor Dostoyevsky was adapted by the director to Putin's time, so much so that I thought that the movie (filmed in 2017) was made after the start of the present Ukraine war. The un-named woman leaves her residence and travels to the prison where her husband is held, without knowing that she enters a kafkaesque maze where the individual is a prisoner of the whim of the authorities. The reader is advised to remember all the passersby because they will be back towards the end. A very unusual movie, worth watching by all means despite its length.