A word to the boys: in the body horror "Shural" they eat the earth, bite and tickle to death

Tatar folklore, illegal deforestation, bandits, nouveau riche and start—ups - all this is packed into a mystical horror film about a runaway bride "Shural". From this moment on, the name of the Leshy from folk tales will be associated with a wide audience not only with the Mariinsky Ballet, but also with the first directorial work of Alina Nasibullina, an actress from Crystal, Vitka Garlic and Roman Mikhailov's Films about Love, and Mikhailov himself played the brightest male role in Shural. the role. At the same time, Maxim Matveev, Ruzil Minekaev, Sergey Gilev, Evgeny Sangadzhiev and Nasibullina's husband, the rapper Husky, are also involved in the ensemble, which would automatically make any film an event. The national distribution of the film started today.

What is the movie "Shurale" about

The feeling of deja vu when watching a movie does not deceive. Of course, we've already seen these quotes from the "Twin Peaks" screensaver with a sawmill, this bride who ran away into the woods, her tragic rushes through a mysterious magical space, men with guns, an unsuspecting groom. All this was in the video clip for the clingiest folk hit of this decade, AIGEL's song "Pyala", which was the emotional core of the TV series "The Word of a Kid". It wasn't even a music video, but a short film lasting less than three minutes. It was directed and starred by Alina Nasibullina, whom the audience of Russian auteur cinema knew from the art hit "Crystal", but the general public did not know at all. The clip has garnered 70 million views, and Nasibullina, it turns out, has been unfolding this story all these years until an hour-and-a-half full-length debut. And from "The Boy's Word", as if on purpose to emphasize a non-accidental parallel, she invited Ruzil Minekaev to the team.

Nasibullina's character is called Aisha here. She is happy with Mikhail, an ambitious startup who is currently looking for funding for research in the field of longevity and youth preservation. A wedding is about to take place, a long and happy life lies ahead, but suddenly Aisha's mother calls: the girl's stepbrother, who was engaged in illegal logging of the Tatar sacred grove, has disappeared. Aisha immediately rushes to look for us, and we quickly realize that it's not just about her brother. Something inside the heroine attracts her to these ancient trees, something is happening inside her, incomprehensible for the time being, not only for others, but also for Aisha herself.

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How to watch "Shurale"

A cinephile rebus and at the same time a genre low-budget movie, "Shurale" already informs the attentive viewer in the credits that Alina Nasibullina did not work alone on the script of her debut. The co-authors are Igor Poplaukhin, a specialist in the history of runaway women, winner of the Cannes Film Festival for the short film "Calendar" and creator of the parable of the last days of Yanka Diaghilev, "The white world came together on you."

It's hard to say who owns which elements of the script here, but most likely the numerous puzzles of this film and catchy quotes belong to Poplaukhin as a cinephile aesthete and just a more experienced cinematographer. For example, already at the beginning of the film, one of the lumberjacks suddenly remembers the "Tatar" and mockingly says: "Life is hanging by a thread, but he thinks about profit." Of course, Tatar is the hero of the movie "Brother", and the proverb belongs to St. Petersburg gangster Kruglyom, who was brilliantly played by Sergei Murzin in Balabanov. He is still one of the brightest villains of Russian cinema.

Why is this quote needed here? Set us up to face organized crime? Is it going to be good with fists and guns? Or is it just a tribute? We get the answer in the second half of the film, when we meet "Uncle Zhenya," a local authority to whom Aisha turns for help. Roman Mikhailov gives such a benefit here that it seems that many viewers, especially from his fan base, will go to the film just for him in the frame. Uncle Zhenya is a fool, an intelligent, predatory and powerful man, and it is possible that some of his phrases will also become folk aphorisms. And at that moment, we realize that the authors of the picture were preparing us for a meeting with him already at the start.

Or take the poem that Aisha reads to the guests at the party. The girl writes poetry that only the groom seems to know about so far, and her performance begins with the line "Whispers and screams of my forest." The viewer shudders: why would there be a masterpiece by Ingmar Bergman? Are we going to see new "Scenes from married life"? "The Hour of the Wolf"? The Maiden's Spring?

Or take the film's cast. We are presented with artists of the highest category: Matveev, Gilev, Minekaev, Sangadzhiev. Plus Husky, plus the rising star Maria Matzel from Dyatlov Pass, Roman Mikhailov's muse, starring in almost every one of his films. And we usually think that once a major artist is in the frame, it means that his character will somehow show himself vividly, will play a significant role in the development of the plot. But the authors here are obviously happy to deceive our expectations. Many stars will remain only in the episodes or in the background, and their less "illuminated" colleagues will be among the main characters. So sometimes the thought even creeps in, maybe they shouldn't have learned their lines in Tatar, since they weren't really allowed to turn around anyway.

In the center of the film, however, is still the same "bride", Aisha, and the metamorphoses that occur with her soul and body. Her wanderings through the forests, her encounters with humans and other intelligent beings, her fears, her willingness to go to the end. How Alina Nasibullina combined such a complex and intense work of an artist, especially when there are elements of a rare subgenre of body horror in Russia, with directorial duties, one can only guess.

And at the same time, it's clear that she couldn't trust someone else to shoot either. The feeling of female optics, of a specific view of the heroine from the outside, through the camera lens and circumstances, and from the inside, through acting, would disappear. Therefore, when Aisha strips off her clothes or skin, devours the ground with dried grass, or dodges a deadly tickle, we connect here entirely. Sometimes it's not even part of the film anymore, but like an independent performance that could be shown separately.

Perhaps, for a film that grew out of a video clip, all those shortcomings are excusable, which the audience, even after the premiere of the picture in the competition of the Moscow International Film Festival, gladly began to look for. If we formulate them in a few words, then, of course, the viewer lacks integrity and some kind of genre unity.

Body horror, folklore fantasy, an aesthetic comedy parable in the spirit of Alexei Fedorchenko, science fiction in the footsteps of the Strugatskys, a crime detective, a Bergman family drama, the creation of a domestic Twin Peaks, where Aisha would become our Laura Palmer - the film manages to try everything at once in an hour and a half and has little time to finish what- then to the end. We can say that the authors wanted it that way, we had to get lost in the film just like Aisha in her native forests and swamps. Everyone is free to decide for themselves. But the absence in the soundtrack of at least a fragment of the original source, the song "Pyala", is really upsetting. If the film is about the roots, then you shouldn't break away from the roots either.