Not Like Dad

Dmitry Efimovich's 2021 Russian film is about the distance between a grown man and his father. The narrative moves between two times: the present, in which a father does not know how to behave with his own child, and the nineties, when his own father raised him in the middle of the post-Soviet collapse, hard and never showing what he felt. The film both criticises that generation's idea of fatherhood and tries to understand it: the beatings, the silence, the inability to show affection, and the bond formed in spite of it. The comic register dominates, and the detail of daily life in the nineties is full of references familiar to anyone in Russia who lived through it. The emotional ending aims squarely at the audience. It did well at the Russian box office. Who it's for: viewers who like generational father and son stories and Russian popular cinema. Who it's not for: anyone who will miss the period references, or who will find corporal punishment used as comic material a problem.