Jan­u­ary

At the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary, a porter (Samuel Finzi) and an Old Man (Ios­sif Sur­chadziev) while away their time eat­ing wal­nuts and doing a cross­word as they await the return of their boss Petar Motorov. The clues of the cross­word con­cern world lit­er­a­ture, glob­al geog­ra­phy and inter­na­tion­al cui­sine – in oth­er words, about a whole uni­verse beyond these men’s imme­di­ate, enclosed envi­ron­ment in a snow­bound cab­in near the woods. The porter only occa­sion­al­ly ven­tures to enter the adja­cent, aban­doned Sovi­et-era hotel, its ruins dec­o­rat­ed with fall­en por­traits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezh­nev. There he refu­els the gen­er­a­tor that keeps the lights and heat on in this oth­er­wise dark midwinter.

The film, too, becomes a puz­zle­box for the view­er, draw­ing us into its com­pound­ing enig­mas and demand­ing that we think our way out of her­met­ic spaces in which we, along with the char­ac­ters, have become lost. For here the raven that the Old Man keeps in a cage, and the lob­sters that the porter tends in tanks in the hotel’s repur­posed rooms, are metaphors for a very human con­di­tion of try­ing to grasp the infi­nite and the meta­phys­i­cal from with­in the nar­row con­fines of mor­tal, embod­ied experience.

In its adap­ta­tion from Yor­dan Radichkov’s 1974 alle­gor­i­cal play of the same name, Jan­u­ary has also accu­mu­lat­ed all man­ner of cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences. Its (most­ly) mono­chrome pre­sen­ta­tion, folk­loric fix­a­tions and even its very title evoke Rain­er Sarnet’s 2017 film Novem­ber, while its mar­riage of real­ism and the irra­tional, pol­i­tics and para­ble recalls Béla Tarr​’s sim­i­lar­ly black-and-white 2000 work, Wer­ck­meis­ter Harmonies.

The snow­bound set­ting, all-male cast, belea­guer­ing per­il and para­noia sug­gest John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982, while the frozen hotel, an axe, twin chil­dren in a cor­ri­dor, an infer­nal Bar­tender (Malin Krastev) and an old inte­ri­or paint­ing appar­ent­ly, impos­si­bly depict­ing the main play­ers, all specif­i­cal­ly ref­er­ence the time­less chills of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Yet the hor­ror in Jan­u­ary is of a more exis­ten­tial order, as these men are con­front­ed with decid­ed­ly Carte­sian conun­drums: are they awake or dream­ing?; might they even be, as in the famous Taoist rid­dle, part of an animal’s dream?; or are they indeed alive or dead? ​“It’s always like this in Jan­u­ary”, the Bar­tender will tell the porter, in words that reflex­ive­ly con­jure the film’s title. ​“The wind blows over the snow­drifts and you can’t be sure of any­thing.” That sense of uncer­tain­ty per­vades this first fic­tive fea­ture from doc­u­men­tar­i­an Andrey Paounov, which is beau­ti­ful and unnerv­ing­ly eerie in equal, equiv­o­cal measure.