Director – Adilkhan Yerzhanov – 2024 – Kazakhstan, France – 83m
***
A mercenary known by the codename ‘Moor’ returns from the war to the big city to rescue his younger brother’s wife and son from her husband’s debts – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Found by the authorities, who apprehend him by a perimeter fence and remove his bag of home-made weaponry which includes a wooden bow and arrows and a knife carved from bone, which he will get back and make use of later in the plot, Moor is processed alongside wounded and traumatised veterans. He speaks few words and is in complete control of his faculties. The chief of police, who talks in a confident, jokey manner and insists on addressing him as Bro, feels more like a gangster than a cop, wearing a snakeskin jacket not unlike the hero of Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and often accompanied by a small entourage who read as gangsters rather than cops, even though the group occasionally expands to contain officers with the word POLICE on the back of their jackets.
He explains that Moor’s younger brother Houdini has disappeared, leaving behind him not only a mountain of debt but also a wife and small son. The wife (Anna Starchenko) is working off the debt by working for The Agency, which appears to be a media company doing photographic, modelling shoots with “being nice to the clients” tacked on. Cue sleazy fat guy glimpsed through the door to the room beyond, drumming two fingers in anticipation of things to come. The wife has style, and some to spare: long, crimson hair and black leather outfit, variations on which she will wear throughout the film.
Popping up at various points is a debt collector in a blue jacket, given to putting a knife to the wife’s throat and drawing blood by way of encouraging her to keep up the payments. Moor saves her from him by punching through the car side window, and she takes him to her flat where she meets her son Tommy, a five-year-old with a lively mind who we first meet playing a game of hiding under one of several cardboard boxes. The child also seems to like numeric rhymes, and when it looks in a later scene as if mother and son are about to be shot point-blank in cold blood, by the police chief she instructs Tom to recite a countdown rhyme to keep his mind off the situation.
Ostensibly an action movie, the film has a curious approach to that genre, much of its action being shot so that it happens too briefly to take in, or partly outside the edge of the frame so you can’t see it. This appears to be a deliberate stylistic choice, but it’s a curious one that makes little sense to your current scribe. Apart from that, and although it’s a Khazak movie, it feels a lot like that French school of action movie-making which is shot through with callousness and misogyny, as if it were impossible to have the one without the other. It’s no surprise that the film is a French-Kazhak co-production.
The film is subtly art directed with quite considerable restraint, and stylishly shot to give a feeling of modern metal and concrete architecture, but its palette largely devoid of green does start to pall after a while. A couple of highly effective scenes towards the start provide a high point: the camera tracking past a series of war-damaged veterans in various states of injury or trauma before finally passing an office water bottle (which releases a bubble of air) and the schtum-keeping Moor, who is clearly not going to be phased by anything, as he proves almost immediately by switching from immobile passive to pushing an interview panel table forward with his foot to trap the rifles of the three heavies sitting behind it under the edge of the table.
By way of contrast, the other great moment comes much later on, when the child touches Moor’s forehead with his finger in an obvious cinematic parody of E.T. the Extre-Terrestrial (Stephen Spielberg, 1982), although quite what the point of that parody is beyond gratuitous film buff nerdiness, I’m not sure.
With: Berik Aitzhanov, Anna Starchenko, Zhandos Aibasov
Moor premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 8th to Sunday, November 24th 2024.
This review originally appeared on DMovies.org: you can find it here.
Trailer: