January

In 1980, the population of Bulgaria was nine million. Today it is seven million. Where did all those people go? And was a man called Peter Motorov amongst them?

It’s hard to watch January without thinking of November. The country may be different but there’s the same sense of post-Communist malaise as isolated villagers struggle to get by in harsh conditions, the same weighty black and white photography, the same conjuring of obscure folklore where the mythical and the mechanical intersect. Where that film burrowed into the darkness, however, January is illuminated by flashes of wit, and its satirical underpinnings are every bit as vital as its central mystery.

Peter Motorov is missing. Villagers come by to bother the guard (Samuel Finzi) about it, as he sits in his hut painstakingly cracking walnuts, one by one, using an overly complicated machine. His only human company is that of an old man (Iossif Surchadzhiev), who may be closer to death than he looks, and who is trying to solve crossword puzzles in between power cuts. There is also a bird, some species of corvid, locked in a cage. To set it free would be cruelty, we are told – it would not know how to survive in the wild. Can the same be said of these people, unexpectedly released from the Communist yoke? The guard represents an authority which no longer exists. he has nobody to answer to; he also has no resources upon which to draw. He must try to solve this mystery himself.

How might he do so? The conviction gradually forms that Peter Motorov must have gone into the woods – but, says the guard, only an idiot would go into the woods in January. There is no sense in following him. For the meantime, all they can do is wait. A parade of characters – locals and travellers, who include an Orthodox priest and a company of exorcists following in a much older tradition – visit whilst they do so, complicating the mystery further. Peter Motorove’s horse brings his sleigh out of the forest; it carries a frozen wolf. Perhaps this has been used to keep other wolves away. Ove time, however, the horse makes more trips, and the situation descends into absurdity as further frozen wolves accrue.

Woven into this are warnings about the tenetz, a particular Northern Bulgarian phenomenon. Some people call it a ghost or a plutenik, they say. Idiots in the city call it a vampire, but it is not any of those things: it is a tenetz. In winter, in the woods, the tenetz can get into your head and makes you feel warm and sleepy, but if you fall asleep, you will dream a tenetz dream and be unable to wake. If you are then brought back to your village, the whole village will fall asleep and the dream will spread to the next village. Not only humans can dream like this, but cows, chickens, even dogs. Questions are asked about who is the dreamer and who the dreamed, about how one could tell if the whole world were already asleep, but no-one really wants to answer.

Adapting Yordan Radichkov’s spiky 1974 play, co-writer/director Andrey Paounov creates a tremendous atmosphere, even though we rarely stray outside the hut itself. The bright white snow and bare branches of trees make a chilly enough impression to persuade us of the inhospitable nature of the surrounding land, making the village feel all the more isolated. Each time the horse returns, we hear its straining breath, see its exhaustion. Inside, as the men converse, the bird rattles at its cage, trying to figure out a way of releasing itself. The wind whistles against the windows. The door rattles – not enough to suggest an immediate threat, but just enough to keep us on edge. to ensure that the absurdist comedy does no detract from the mounting tension.

Towards the end, the structure of the film begins to break down. The guard finds himself in a long corridor, clutching an axe; local twins reappear there in a nod to The Shining. Suddenly he emerges into a world full of colour. Is this the dream, or did the dream precede this? Is he emerging into the modern world, or has the soul of Bulgaria been left behind in that little hut, last refuge of order?

Obscurely satisfying, January is a chilly little film which will stay with you.