Siberia – first look review

‘Run­away’ by Del Shan­non will nev­er be the same once you’ve seen Willem Dafoe skip­ping around a may­pole to it on a bright summer’s day. This vision is a flash of bright­ness in Siberia, Abel Ferrara’s pun­ish­ing, frag­ment­ed onslaught of Niet­zschean bleak­ness. If the pre­vi­ous sen­tence reads as heavy and tor­tured then it accu­rate­ly con­veys the ambi­ence of a film that often feels like an endurance test.

The sto­ry, inso­far as there is one, revolves around Clint (Willem Dafoe) hav­ing visions and dream­ing of dif­fer­ent episodes from his past while self-exiled to a cave in a snow-cov­ered land. These visions and dreams unfold in no par­tic­u­lar order, and involve a lay­er­ing of time­lines. Present-day Clint hears mean­ing­ful sounds as he trav­els on a sled pulled by huskies; sound which belongs to the next scene, which belongs to the past.

Ini­tial­ly, it’s impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the mem­o­ries from the visions, or to con­nect them to the shape or sub­stance of a real life. Out of nowhere emerge sequences that are by turns blas­phe­mous, base and down­right strange: a naked female dwarf in a wheel­chair repeat­ing the line ​“I just want to sing and dance”; a Russ­ian lady who comes to Clint’s bar with her grand­moth­er and, after one shot of vod­ka, strips to reveal that she is heav­i­ly pregnant.

The pac­ing is pon­der­ous and char­ac­ters are con­stant­ly on the verge of being swal­lowed by dark­ness. The space they inhab­it is a small, shad­owy bub­ble with­in a vast white land­scape. Fer­rara often turns to drone shots to cap­ture the enor­mi­ty of a moun­tain range dot­ted with fir trees.

Clint speaks in frag­ments of dense exis­ten­tial voiceover which expose a soul fight­ing to redeem itself. What kind of a life has brought him to this point? Did some­thing tru­ly awful dri­ve him to live in a cave alone? Or is he just a sen­si­tive dude prone to being excep­tion­al­ly hard on him­self? Fer­rara is in no hur­ry to feed us an answer. So we go on voy­ages to meet – or remem­ber – more folks, most of whom are excep­tion­al­ly seri­ous, fire-and-brim­stone types, includ­ing sev­er­al prac­ti­tion­ers of the black arts.

The mid sec­tion of the film is tru­ly mad­den­ing; a soup of bare­ly-con­nect­ed, fore­bod­ing images. Clint’s moth­er, father and even his boy­hood self flash up as char­ac­ter­less wraiths. Fer­rara makes approx­i­mate­ly zero con­ces­sions towards nar­ra­tive clar­i­ty, call­ing to mind Carl Jung’s ​‘The Red Book’ in sub­stance and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist in tone. One char­ac­ter recites a speech from ​‘Thus Spake Zarathus­tra’ by Friedrich Niet­zsche, a philoso­pher famed for the line, ​“If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.” Siberia is The Abyss Stares Back: The Movie.

Final­ly, an ex-wife is gen­er­ous­ly thrown into the mix. Yet Clint’s ills, once they are laid bare, are too pedes­tri­an for the out­size des­tiny he has fash­ioned for him­self. The pun­ish­ment doesn’t fit the crime, just as the visions don’t fit the char­ac­ter. In fact: noth­ing fits. Dafoe gives his all but is over­shad­owed by his pup­pet mas­ter. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ste­fano Falivene’s images are stun­ning but dis­cor­dant, as they have clear­ly been craft­ed in pur­suit of a lan­guage known only to the dreamer-director.