Review: Dau
by David Katz
- VENICE 2026: The latest film from Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s controversy-ridden project is a sweeping, terrifying character study of Lev Landau, the Soviet nuclear physicist
When initial reports on Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s multimedia DAU project came out in 2011, it was met with immense fascination as well as profound scepticism. These objections intensified when the project’s first two features, DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration, premiered at the 2020 Berlinale, where accusations of psychological coercion and mistreatment of the cast were levelled at the director, who adamantly denied them. Now, with the industry’s attitude to Khrzhanovsky shifting again, with his renouncement of his Russian citizenship, his firm stance against the invasion of Ukraine, and residual respect for the project’s ambition, he premieres its summative work in Venice’s competition, a biographical drama simply entitled Dau, portraying a heavily fictionalised version of the Soviet theoretical and nuclear physicist Lev Landau, whose life initially inspired the entire artistic undertaking.
Russia has been a perennial bogeyman and threat to the whole European continent, even whilst its artists have created some of the supreme masterpieces of cinema, music, painting and literature. From this reviewer’s sole viewing, Dau is potentially the latest one of these, although it isn’t the kind of work you might conventionally “treasure" and wish to experience multiple times. Instead, it’s the audiovisual statement on the spiralling corruption of the USSR that the country could never produce during its existence, displaying a social climate already poisoned and only disintegrating further, alongside the many technocrats and ordinary people who both suffered and contributed to it. As a meditation on the paranoid grip of totalitarianism, of course infecting Russia and its imperial foreign aims to this very day, it ironically could only have been made, by Khrzhanovsky and his many brilliant collaborators, under fearless and precious conditions of freedom in the present.
Dau is chiefly a masterpiece of brick-by-brick world-building. With the narrative spanning 40 years from 1928-1968, Khrzhanovsky creates an utterly immersive environment - redolent of the recent Russian master Aleksei German - in each of its settings, from bohemian Leningrad at the start, through Dau’s (his common diminutive) first government research position in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in the 1930s, to his equal-parts autocratic leadership and entrapment within the Secret Scientific Institute in Moscow for the remainder. Dau is played by acting first-timer Teodor Currentzis, an eminent Greek-Russian conductor, and his shock of fuzzy, jet-black hair, and gaunt, thin face, makes him look like a combination of a French Symbolist poet and The Cure’s Robert Smith, his bug-eyed expressions first denoting mad, scientific inspiration, and then haunted disaffection. After he meets factory girl Nora (Radmila Shchogolieva, one of the film’s only professional actors) in Kharkiv, she subsequently becomes his loyal wife, who can only look away in horror as Dau embarks on numerous, predatory affairs.
As development on the Soviet nuclear bomb continues apace at the institute, in parallel with more troubling experiments on enhancing human physical and cognitive potential, it becomes its own near-autonomous zone within Russia: a low-lit and concrete-paved shadow space, where cosmopolitan, intellectual debate on science from foreign dignitaries is welcome - these eminent boffins, like those in Oppenheimer, are striving to invent the future, before the USA of course - and a sanctum of indulgent sexual hedonism. Even though they commissioned the institute, the authorities and secret police can’t abide it: it soon becomes a potent symbol of Russian self-loathing: venerated, scorned and always surveilled.
Alongside intermittent, quick-cut foreshadowing montages, sometimes derived from the multitude of footage that couldn’t be included, there are occasional abstract and fantastical tableaux, most spectacularly at what looks like a nuclear test in Siberia. In the final analysis, Dau emerges as a virtuoso and incisive piece of political cinema, salvaged from the questionable methodology that created it.
Dau is a co-production by Germany, France and Sweden, staged by Phenomen Berlin Filmproduktion, Essential Filmproduktion, Parisienne de Production and Plattform Produktion. Its world sales are handled by producers Ilya Khrzhanovsky and Philippe Bober’s own company, IP Filmworks.
Photogallery 09/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Dau
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© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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