Siberia, 2020.
Directed by Abel Ferrara.
Starring Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Dounia Sichov and Simon McBurney.
SYNOPSIS:
A man who abandoned his whole life to tend bar in Siberia embarks on a voyage of self-discovery when he visits a strange cave.
Few people do narration like Willem Dafoe. That distinctive, unsettling voice has provided a unique feel to various movies – most recently the brilliant Vox Lux – and pulls the same trick in the opening moments of Siberia. Things go downhill pretty rapidly from there.
This baffling exercise in elliptical pretension is Dafoe’s sixth collaboration with Abel Ferrara, whose near-50-year directorial career has taken him from the exploitation trash of The Driller Killer through to his recent run of festival-friendly drama. Festival audiences are just about the only people for whom this one is friendly, or even palatable.
It’s a movie that feels openly hostile to any audience member who deigns to attempt to decode it. Notably, though, Ferrara doesn’t seem to care. The movie wears its lack of coherence brazenly and on its sleeve, as if to dare anyone to delve into its existential meanderings. Nominally, it’s the story of English speaker Clint (Dafoe), who has exiled himself from Western society and runs a bar in the midst of the Siberian wilderness. He has a strange encounter in a cave after a dogsled journey, and this seems to send his fractured psyche on a journey right into the heart of itself.
If your reaction to that is a weary shake of the head, join the club. This is a movie in which laughable dialogue like “your soul is outside of you and you must claim it” and “I myself was someone else, inside or outside me” is supposed to be taken seriously. Quite frankly, derisive chuckles are a more reasonable response to a script that sounds as if it was written by a self-help author – which it was, with Ferrara joined on writing duties by regular collaborator and Think Like a Shrink author Christ Zois.
Dafoe struggles manfully to rescue proceedings, but his frequently puzzled, craggy visage is unable to save this movie from its own, pseudo-intellectual self. It’s like being sat next to the worst person at a party, who keeps telling you how much better Christopher Nolan movies are if you’re high. There’s a flash of a bear attack that’s never explained, a talking fish and several scenes in which Dafoe converses with different versions of himself, delineated by bizarre costume choices – comedy shades or a coating of shaving foam.
Ferrara helms the whole thing with a fluid sense of both time and place, shifting from the icy expanse of Siberia to a lush jungle or a Nomadic desert community and with night or day often melting in without warning. The imagery is handsome and surprising, with technical flair on show courtesy of cinematographer Stefano Falivene. Too often, though, it feels like pretty pictures shorn of meaning, lacking any logical continuity or even a thesis to string together its nonsensical vignettes.
Only a blistering interaction between Dafoe and a character known only as “ex-wife” (Dounia Sichov) even threatens to throw the audience some narrative breadcrumbs, but even that quickly devolves into a montage of Dafoe indiscriminately bonking a roulette wheel of unidentified folks. And his own mother, maybe.
Watching Siberia is a deeply frustrating experience, in which 90 minutes feels anything but tight in the face of the movie’s long road to nowhere. The last time a film called Siberia hit cinemas, it was a 2018 thriller in which Keanu Reeves trudged around doing very little under grey lighting for two hours. Ferrara’s therapist-couch odyssey of indulgence might not be quite as bad as that. But it is impenetrable guff.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
