HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 13
3rd of 12 countries: Russia

Listening to Tim Lucas' audio commentary of Mario Bava's Black Sunday, I discovered that Bava had been given his own choice of material for his full feature debut, and as he had been a huge fan of the story as a child, he decided to adapt Nikolai Gogol's novella, The Viy. I figured that would be worth a read, and it was then that I discovered that the film bore no real resemblance to the story at all. So, if you want a faithful adaptation of the source material, Viy is the film for you.

Maybe some of the the almost procedural detail about Russian (actually I think this is set in Ukraine) life in the... gee, you know, it's really hard to know when this is set - it could be anywhere between the 15th and the 19th centuries, I suppose - maybe that will bore some. I liked Gogol's depiction of the seminarians as basically a bunch of louts, which this film leans into as well, and I guess this is an element of folk-horror which I just have a thing for. It's the tendency for films of this ilk to take on an almost archaeological quality - breathing life into lost ways of life, letting us see what it was like. (BTW, basically in any time and place before the Industrial Revolution - actually, before the 20th century - life was pretty shit).

The first thing that strikes one about Viy is how ravishingly beautiful it is. And especially in that mausoleum set - there's something about candlelit, gothic cavernous spaces like that in films that just twitches my joy nerve, it looks fucking amazing. The film has that lush 60's hazy sheen to it as well, so if you're ever wondering why some people are less enthusiastic about the rise of digital film, watch this movie and consider how nothing in digital will ever look like this - this aesthetic is a quality you can only get from film and it's honestly one of the features of older movies that ensures I will always spend more time with them than with new releases. There's also the fact that there's an uncountable wealth of brilliant movies from prior decades which any given year's new crop couldn't possibly compete with, but, you know...

The action of the film is a little restrained for much of its run time, although the atmosphere and the period detail is fascinating. However, if you have a short attention span, try and hang in there for the final fifteen minutes or so which goes completely bugnuts crazy with more demons and monsters than you can poke a stick at.

This is a film I suspect will grow in my estimation because - a bit like my experience with Black Sunday, actually - it's one of those movies whose plot is not exactly scintillatingly involved but whose basic aesthetic is so deeply beautiful, it tends to take me a few viewings to realise how much I love it.