Synopsis
In a poor Estonian village, a group of peasants use magic and folk remedies to survive the winter, and a young woman tries to get a young man to love her.
Directed by Rainer Sarnet
In a poor Estonian village, a group of peasants use magic and folk remedies to survive the winter, and a young woman tries to get a young man to love her.
no vem ber, Noviembre, Rehepapp, Ноябрь, 11월, Ноември, Listopad, 魔鬼时光, 狼人、魔鬼,有時愛情, Novembro, Noiembrie, Kasım, ノベンバー
Friendship ended with Black Phillip, Now Bible-crushing plague pig is my best friend.
Bonkers bizarro monochromatic folk horror, filled with style and a whole lot of wtf head tilting moments. I’d say more but this is better just going in blind. Those Estonians know how to party.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
When your film begins with a cow being abducted by a cow skull helicopter made of farm implements, you know you're in for something a bit special.
To be honest with you, I find detailed plot synopses tedious at the best of times (for writer and reader alike), but it would be more redundant here than usual, given that the primary appeal of November isn't to the intellect, but to the senses. Sure, there are some discernible sub-plots concerning witchcraft, revolting peasants and the vaguest of werewolf mythoses, but it's the visuals and the sound that make this such an enchanting two hours. Mart Taniel's black and white cinematography is a thing of beauty; the image sometimes over-exposed and bleached…
Go in thinking you’re about to have an austere Estonian horror experience, end up with one of the most immersive, elegiac, bawdy, silly, beautiful, romantic folkloric fantasy films we’ve seen in ages.
The world-building in this is absolutely wonderful, utilizing Medieval storytelling logic in a way that made me sort of swoon at times.
It works as poetry without ever being arduous, it’s not afraid to be goofy one minute and heartfelt the next, it treats its magical elements with great sincerity, and most of all, it feels completely like the very thing it seeks to be, a fairy tale, both affecting and gleefully absurd.
65
A ghostly netherworld caught between the life and death of a painful reality. Starts out with one of the wildest openings you'll ever see in a movie. The rest is pretty good too.
A haunting, cold tale with an enormous amount of surprising elements. Beautiful imagery, hysterical scenes and dialogues, disturbing, ugly lives and death. A true work of art where every shot is like a gorgeous painting.
I wanted to love this so badly. Everything seemed perfectly tailored to my tastes: Folky horror vibes, stark black and white, funny quirks in the midst of a depressing setting, a teenage love story at the center of associatively blossoming fairytale short stories, connected by something like dream-logic, the whole thing reminiscent of a collection of fairytales from Tadjikistan that I used to read as a child - How could this NOT become my new favorite film immediately?
To put it simply - By being boring.
It pains me to admit this, but "November" bored and annoyed me after a while, never drew me back in and had lost me completely by the end. The whole thing just seemed way too random to hold my interest. Sad!
I saw this at Leeds International Film Festival 2018.
You want weird, may I present November. Fitting in with the works of Tarr and Pawlikowski, as well as films like Hard to Be a God, November is yet another Eastern European black-and-white arthouse flick draped in despair and history. November has a fairy tale quality, in its tale of werewolves, satan, and tools given souls. Yet this surreal picture is a cautionary warning, a film that avoids happy conclusions like the plague. Among the bleached white images and distorted music (both haunting and melancholic), November shows a raw and naked beauty. This is a film of dirt among the people and brightness among the trees. Underneath the blank, unmoving Baltic sky, November…
Beautiful, almost deceptively so. While its scant and somewhat unfocused plotting held it back from being great, November is prepossessingly beguiling with its chilly mythos, expressionistic panoply and shrouded, mysterial aura, even if it failed to pack the emotional punch I had hoped it would. I think I may more mileage out of this upon subsequent viewings—I almost gave it a 7 for the tenebrous splendor of its aesthetic and folkloric sensibilities alone, but decided to hold it at 6 for the time being. Perhaps the next best thing I can say about this one—apart from how visually striking it is—is that it makes me wanna watch Marketa Lazarová again soon; definitely the “big brother” to this movie and if you dug this you should definitely check it out.
Jozlyn Recommends 2: Electric Boogaloo
As I said last Wednesday, this is going to be a weekly thing. Click the above link for details.
Man, I don't even know what the hell to say about this one. I'm at a loss for words. This surreal, phantasmagorical folk-horror jam scrambled my brain like the eggs I had for breakfast. I didn't know what the fuck was going on half the time, but it was never dull. Every single scene presented some striking new visual for my eyeballs to feast on, or some WTF moment to tickle my brain. Dirty peasants mired in muck, supernatural automatons made of farm implements, poetic snowmen, werewolves, devils, spirits, and plagues that take the form of…