KARAntin

Diana Ringo's film is alternately breathtakingly beautiful and scorchingly raw. It is an apocalyptic tone poem full of lyricism and savage emotion, a requiem of sorts for a lost planet and lost love. Anatoly Bely delivers a searing and riveting performance through a series of monologues at different emotional temperatures, at times sardonic, outraged, resigned, and full of regret. His monologues are punctuated by flashbacks, montages of archival footage depicting devastation and destruction. They appear, however, in counterpoint to his visions, containing images of astonishing natural beauty, including those of his lost love, played by Ringo, whose final image, swathed head to toe in dark fur, silhouetted in a snowy landscape, is as haunting as the fabled Snow Queen of Russian legend itself. The film's score, composed by Ringo, is exquisite. It doesn't merely move the story along; it is its emotional nervous system and creates, and is therefore integral to, the film's atmosphere, mood, temperature, and registers of pathos. Part nightmare and part dream, wherein the latter is both the indictment of the former and its redemption.