Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Starring: Berik Aitzhanov, Anna Starchenko, Azamat Nigmanov, Yerken Gubashev
With Steppenwolf, Kazakh writer/director Adilkhan Yerzhanov returns to the template that worked so well for his 2019 neo-noir contemporary western (or eastern) A Dark, Dark Man. Once again we have an amoral male anti-hero who finds himself burdened with a female companion whose presence forces him to consider just how much of his humanity he's lost.
A Dark, Dark Man was set in something close to the real world, whereas Steppenwolf plays out in a fantasy version of rural Kazakhstan that resembles the post-apocalyptic Australia of the Mad Max franchise. Society appears to have broken down and the wastelands are run by various criminal gangs. The movie opens in the aftermath of a riot, with the rioters storming a police station and massacring every uniformed man they find. This provides an opportunity for Brayuk (Berik Aytzhanov), a violent prisoner who has been employed as a police torturer, to make his escape.
Wandering into Brayuk's path is Tamara (Anna Starchenko), a young woman suffering what appears to be shellshock. From her largely nonsensical babblings Brayuk learns that she's looking for her missing son, and that she's willing to pay $5000 if Brayuk can help her find him.
The dynamic between the protagonists of A Dark, Dark Man played a lot like that between Clint Eastwood and Shirley Maclaine in Don Siegel's western Two Mules for Sister Sara, and that's even more so the case with Yerzhanov's latest. Like Maclaine's fake nun, Tamara is revealed to be a prostitute, and while Brayuk initially agrees to help solely for the promise of a cash reward, he finds a more personal motivation for assisting Tamara. We find ourselves wondering if Tamara is genuinely shell-shocked or if it's a way of protecting herself like Maclaine's nun's habit.
Just as the false belief that his travelling companion was a woman of the cloth kept Eastwood's mercenary cowboy from trying any funny stuff, so too does Tamara's ragged mental state preclude Brayuk from taking advantage of the situation in any sexual manner. It's the one ounce of decency that seems intact in Brayuk, who otherwise is as ruthless a killer as you'll ever have seen. We eventually learn what has made Brayuk this way, just what broke his soul, but the film doesn't make excuses for him and it never asks us to sympathise with him. Brayuk is a brute who will kill anyone - man, woman, child or dog - who gets in his way, and were it not for a jammed gun he would have offed Tamara as soon as he met her. Brayuk is a combo of Eastwood's man with no name and Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken, but he makes them look like a pair of choirboys.
Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Star Trek's Jonathan Frakes, Aytzhanov has a striking charisma that keeps us invested as Brayuk commits one atrocity after another. His comic timing is a perfect fit for Yerzhanov's distinctive black as night humour. We just don't get anti-heroes like Brayuk in western cinema anymore, and it's refreshing for a movie to challenge us to spend time in the company of a protagonist so devoid of redemption. As Tamara, Starchenko provides the film with its heart. She's a flower growing through the cracked arid soil of this morally vapid wasteland. Starchenko does a fine job of subtly conveying the strength Tamara slowly summons on this blood-soaked journey into hell. There's no hint of sexual tension or romantic longing between Brayuk and Tamara, but the latter gets under the former's skin nonetheless. Brayuk is often cruel to Tamara, sometimes even physically so, but we come to realise that he's trying to toughen her up so she can survive in this cruel world.
Yerzhanov is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting filmmakers in world cinema, and were he a native of Western rather than Eastern Europe you imagine his talents might have been snapped up Hollywood on the strength of his two pseudo-westerns. On what presumably is a low budget here, he's created a post-apocalyptic world that's as believable as that of George Miller (when Brayuk and Tamara commandeer an oil tanker the influence of the Aussie auteur is made explicitly clear). There are some truly inventive moments here, like how Brayuk puts a pair of sunglasses on Tamara so he can see the reflection of a distant sniper. I'd love to see what Yerzhanov might achieve with a Hollywood budget but I doubt any American studio would greenlight a movie as nihilistic as Steppenwolf.
Steppenwolf is on Arrow Player from May 26th.
