The Stoker

A retired major of Yakut origin, decorated in the Afghan war, works in a boiler room. By day he shovels coal; at night he writes a story on an old typewriter. Men he knows from that war bring things to the furnace and he asks nothing. What they bring are bodies. Aleksei Balabanov writes and directs. The form is built on repetition. The same street, the same walk, the same door and the same piece of music return again and again. It is not a stylistic game; it is the instrument that shows how the man's life actually works. The story he is writing enters the film. The text describes a Russian exile encountering Yakuts in Siberia and is dramatised on screen; the man writes about what was done to his own people while refusing to look at what happens in his own furnace. Balabanov's cinema is known for describing the criminal order of Russia in the nineties and 2000s; he reached a wide audience with the Brat films. The Stoker is the coldest and shortest instance of that line. The music is by Didyulya and rests on the repetition of a single piece; it is the most cited element in the film. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian cinema and the unfeeling branch of crime narrative. Who it is not for: the violence arrives suddenly and unexplained, and the repetition is unbearably monotonous for some.