Ksyusha hardly remembers her father: he disappeared when she was still little. And now, 10 years later, his icy body is found in the mountains. Incredibly, he is showing signs of life, even though he is in a coma. In this state, he is brought home. Ksyusha's mother remarried a long time ago, and the return of the former owner destroys the quiet life of the family: inexplicable ...
Dark Spell is a story about the girl named Zhenya who suffers from being in love with her husband that has left her, so she decides to bring him back. Desperate heroine casts a spell called "Black Wedding", which is a magical ritual known for its great power and irreversibility. After the ritual, her beloved husband comes back, although his love becomes more like an obsession: ...
Like Fritz Lang, David Fincher or Bong Joon Ho before him, talented debut filmmaker Lado Kvataniya uses the concept of police detective vs serial killer for an excitingly stylised, macabre and haunting narrative, that ultimately revolves around the identity of an era: in this case, the late 1980s Soviet Union. With Glasnost and the end of communist rule, the West also learned of the (unsurprising) fact that there were serial killers in Russia too – the most notorious case probably that of Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper, or the Russian Hannibal Lecter. Based on these and many other sources, Kvataniya and screenwriter Olga Gorodetskaya constructed an immersive psychological puzzle, jumping back and forth in time, to reveal ever new-possible motives for the actions of all the protagonists. It all starts in 1990, when Detective Issa Davydov is celebrating his promotion and receives a call, reporting a crime that looks precisely like the ones of the serial killer that he famously captured some years before ...
The story of a girl who, in an attempt to understand the mysterious suicide of her younger sister, embarks on a dangerous game, hoping to stop the curators of the "death group" pushing teenagers to suicide.