«Мёртвые Дочери»
A legend spread all over Moscow: some time ago a crazy mother had
killer her three little daughters, but after a while they returned as revenge-seeking
ghosts and killed her. Unfortunately, their rage and blood lust weren’t satisfied and
they killed the last person who saw their mother alive. In this way, one by one, a chain
of mysterious deaths surrounds Moscow, concentrated around a group of student friends. The
only way of avoiding death is not to do anything bad during three days. But nobody
actually knows what is “bad” in the daughters’ thinking.
By many points “Dead Daughters” is worth watching. The movie was
reported about as far back as 2005, when the director Pavel Ruminov started to elucidate
every step of making the movie on his LJ page (online-diary on www.livejournal.com). Soon
the project got a big group of online supporters, and by the time of its release in
February 2007 the movie was almost a cult film.
So what is so remarkable about this low-budget movie, made in the not
very popular (in Russia) genre of a mystic thriller? It may sound strange, but it’s
remarkable for its genre at first. The plot reminds one of US analogues like “The
Ring” and “The Grudge” and, unfortunately, this is quite a big minus. But I’d like
to point out, that the plot is not such an important thing for a horror movie. The main
thing is atmosphere. However, in “Daughters” released in the West by this point too
– the interiors and dйcor are stylish, but the movie is not frightening at the end. It
definitely has a depressive atmosphere, thanks to the dark blue and black lighting (the
colour spectrum is my favourite thing about this movie). But the movie is too long to be
scary. Length is another important thing for a horror movie, and Ruminov miscalculated
when he gave too much screen time to some characters and too little attention to the
others. Plus the acting is questionable.
The main question which this movie suggests is should horror movies and
thrillers actually be shot in Russia in the future? My personal opinion – they
definitely should be, because an unhealthy shortage of genre films is pretty obvious in
Russian cinematography nowadays. Rumonov’s movie surely went too deeply toward the
art-house end of the spectrum, which broke many important horror film rules (one of which
says ‘never let your viewer fall asleep during your movie’), but he, however, earned a
round of applauses for being courageous and original.
By Michael Agafonov,
Lyceum No. 1523
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