09/07/2024 - Writer-director Anja Kreis’s long-awaited sophomore feature buckles under the weight of myriad references, moods and conceptual ambitions

In 2018, Soviet-born Anja Kreis won a Special Jury Award at the Transilvania IFF with her graduation film, Scythe Hitting Stone [+see also:
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film profile], a macabre, quasi-dystopian drama premiering at this year’s Karlovy Vary IFF, in the Proxima Competition. The writer-director has adopted a meticulous approach to themes of violence and the complexities of human nature – in both cinematographic and philosophical terms – but the strain on her new film feels a tad too heavy.

The plot revolves around a philosophy teacher, Varvara (Maria Chuprinskaya), and her sister Angelina (Dana Ciobanu), who is a gynaecologist transferred from Moscow to the small, nameless Russian town where the former lives and works. What’s clear is that the town is in disarray: the new motorway allows for more sex work and more abortions, and the townspeople are bewildered and want to regain their peace and quiet. Everything else around the story remains largely unclear. There are numerous clashes between the sisters, both antagonistic and arrogant to everyone (including each other), many scenes set in the university and the clinic to showcase their bizarre working environments, and a ton of secondary and tertiary characters that make up a (pretty messed-up) microcosmos in X town. Of course, not all films need a plot or a sustained narrative arc, and The Alienated compensates for this with a morbid, yet largely appealing, atmosphere of social entropy.

As a child, Kreis used to spend time in the gynaecologist's office where her mother worked, and this child-like wonder, painted with large brush strokes of terror, permeates the film from beginning to end. Perhaps the most perplexing scenes are enveloped in shadows that seem to throb with uncanniness and anticipation: the corridors, the empty streets, the corners of the rooms shot statically and from a distance all teeter on horror, but never quite topple over into that territory. It is the Steadicam and long takes that aid a temporary immersion in a world without God, or “beyond good and evil”, as Varvara herself says.

The Alienated hammers home its philosophical references at any opportune moment, but in its attempt to imagine a Nietzschean world in rural Russia, it ends up simplifying a lot of the discussions around the genealogy of morals that haunts the German philosopher’s works. Theology is rejected, and God is treated as a caricature, but the film does not really want you to buy into an Antichrist subplot – even if it kind of does, formally speaking – and prefers to scatter around quotes and cheap rebuttals that amount to little more than rash cynicism. If you found yourself traumatised by Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [+see also:
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film profile], The Alienated is perhaps not the film for you. Even though it asks some pertinent questions regarding bodily autonomy and abortion, its treatment of the latter is so heavy-handed (as well as graphic and bleak) that it remains impossible to tell whether this is a self-reflexive, ironic take on hell on Earth, or simply a condemnation in the form of a film.

The Alienated was produced by Germany’s Fortis Fem Film, in co-production with Moldova’s Pascaru Production and French outfit Midralgar.