Danger Of Complete Extinction

'Annihilation' might be more appropriate, as this nihilistic foray into modern Russian adolescent sensibilities suggests a course of absolute destruction. It opens with an address to a half brick in a sock, the sock itself a puppet, and there's symbolism aplenty in reclaimed tunnels and annotated polaroids and a dream of faces.

Phillip is about to have a birthday, call this a coming of age, but it's a willful, destructive, anhedonic adolescence. It progresses less quickly than a shopping trolley down the exit spiral of a multi-storey car park but it's no less circular, returning to moments and ideas before the descent is at an end.

Brooding, bleak, anchored by a tormented performance by Filipp Avdeyev, Konstantin Kolesov's film doesn't have nothing to say but it doesn't have much to say about nothing. Beyond some artifacts of translation (a subtitled reference to sparadrap is a reference to generic adhesive bandage) and some iconography of modern Russia (the ubiquitous Mercedes saloon) there's almost a placelessness - it's anchored more in time and sensation than location, and that's fair enough, but it wanders enough to suggest it could be doing more and that starts to be enough to indicate it has lost focus.

There are some good moments. The ending manages to be both definite and ambiguous, but the mostly metaphysical danger isn't given enough concrete anchors, post-industrial brutalist geography notwithstanding, and as such the film doesn't quite work.