Fancy a murder mystery wrapped way too tightly inside a feminist rant against hunting, with sideways deviations into astrology and fundamentalist rural Catholic perspectives? Then perhaps Polish director Agnieszka Holland's Spoor is just the vehicle for you. However I believe most viewers of this exceedingly odd movie, are unlikely to die wondering why it failed to gain entry to the Foreign Films category of the 2017 Academy Awards. Much as it looks quite attractive in sections, it is a film completely devoid of any sort of suspense, with a creaky, unfocused, disengaging plot, guaranteed to frustrate cinephiles, eager to appreciate a worthwhile narrative.
The storyline follows part - time teacher and full - time eco - warrior Duszejko, as a search for her beloved missing dogs, finds her becoming increasingly enmeshed in a hunt for a serial - killer, whilst at the same time spurring her to rail against the endemic hunting culture of her remote mountainous village near the Czech border and the faintly bizarre local religious practices encouraged by the coldly impersonal parish priest.
The story fails to flow and crucially the murders themselves are treated as rather minor affairs. Duszeiko herself is drawn as an eccentrically, whiney harpy; one who seems entirely deserving of the blasts she cops from the school's principal, for maverick actions involving her class. With one or two minor exceptions, all the males in the story are drawn boringly stereotypically, as bloodthirsty hunters. In the case of the police, they are seen as stumbling, bumbling, dunderheads, dismissing her worrying observations, as the crackpot theories of a crazy old woman. (Considering the amount of time and exposition, the film devotes to Duszeiko's astrological ramblings, I'd suggest they were only half - wrong.)
The irony in all this, is that the film's underlying premise concerning man's inhumanity towards animals is certainly worthy of a cinematic critique. But one, more interesting and nuanced than what we are delivered here in this torpid, glacially - paced whodunit, whose climax, offers us little in the way of surprises, or plot twists.
The storyline follows part - time teacher and full - time eco - warrior Duszejko, as a search for her beloved missing dogs, finds her becoming increasingly enmeshed in a hunt for a serial - killer, whilst at the same time spurring her to rail against the endemic hunting culture of her remote mountainous village near the Czech border and the faintly bizarre local religious practices encouraged by the coldly impersonal parish priest.
The story fails to flow and crucially the murders themselves are treated as rather minor affairs. Duszeiko herself is drawn as an eccentrically, whiney harpy; one who seems entirely deserving of the blasts she cops from the school's principal, for maverick actions involving her class. With one or two minor exceptions, all the males in the story are drawn boringly stereotypically, as bloodthirsty hunters. In the case of the police, they are seen as stumbling, bumbling, dunderheads, dismissing her worrying observations, as the crackpot theories of a crazy old woman. (Considering the amount of time and exposition, the film devotes to Duszeiko's astrological ramblings, I'd suggest they were only half - wrong.)
The irony in all this, is that the film's underlying premise concerning man's inhumanity towards animals is certainly worthy of a cinematic critique. But one, more interesting and nuanced than what we are delivered here in this torpid, glacially - paced whodunit, whose climax, offers us little in the way of surprises, or plot twists.