Stranger (Movie Review)

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

PLOT: When a female synchronized swimming team suddenly vanishes underwater during a public performance, a spotless detective is assigned to solve the case. Five years later, another woman disappears in a locked room while taking a bath. Are the two cases related? If so, how?

REVIEW: With 25 years under his belt, Ukrainian writer/director Dmitriy Tomashpolsky delivers a trippy and slippery Lynchian-Lovecraftian lovechild called STRANGER, a surreally mesmeric if psychologically vexing cinematic puzzle piece bound to leave most of its viewers with a hanging maw and furrowed brow. Yet, despite the incoherent muddle of the illogical plot, despite the headache it’s sure to induce upon demystifying its cryptic meaning and oblique metaphors, somehow, through striking imagery and intriguing morsels of mythology, the film ultimately boasts an undeniably bizarre hypnotic sway. For as cerebrally challenging and semi-avant-garde as it functions, just like its title suggests, STRANGER is one of the weirdest sci-fi exports I can ever recall watching. In a day and age of torpid unoriginality and listless retreads, that counts for a lot and tends to compensate for the obtuse and inaccessible mystery underpinning the story. So, while the sum of its parts may not add up to a whole lot, there are still enough sporadic bits of brilliance here to admire. With that, keep a tentative eyelid peeled for STRANGER when it locks an official release date in the near future.

A cryptic quotation from H.P. Lovecraft opens the film, followed by a stat declaring that one person goes missing every three minutes, with 5 million vanishings per year. The ominous preamble leads to a visually arresting scene in which a sextet of female swimmers performs a beautifully choreographed dance number before suddenly vanishing underwater. The movie’s confounding structure shows its face with a nonlinear flash-forward five years, where we meet the icily stoic Detective Gluhovsky (Anastasiya Yevtushenko), who hasn’t met a case she couldn’t solve. However, after coming up with zero answers five years prior, she takes it upon herself to investigate a similar disappearance; that of a woman locked alone in a windowless bathroom before vanishing in a bathtub. This takes Gluhovsky to a mysterious filtration plant, where the town’s wastewater is purified alongside a sewage treatment facility. The equally enigmatic staffers seem to already know who Gluhovsky is and assign her to foreboding room 126, one of several “magic numbers” in nuclear physics the suites are numbered after.

If this all sounds beyond the realm of sanity, trust that it gets far crazier. It’s as if you took the oddest of Lovecraft, sprinkled in the disjointed surrealism of Lynch and Atom Egoyan, rolled that sucker uptight, dipped it in Ukrainian formaldehyde and took a vigorous puff. It’s the kind of cinematic sherm-stick where, at least upon first viewing, it’s likely best to sit back and simply allow the surreal imagery to drench your subconscious. Don’t even bother with the puzzling plot. On a technical level, the absolute strengths of the film are its marvelous visual design, spookily colorful lighting, immaculate set-pieces, and precise camerawork. It’s quite astounding that the film marks the inaugural effort from DP Serhii Smychok, who far outdoes his lack of experience by making the dreamily imagistic milieu of the film dazzlingly unnerving throughout. Since the story vexes and bemuses the viewer at every turn, it’s the stunning allure of the spectacles that keep us glued to the frame. Well that, and some eerie mythology involving sneezing at certain times of the day and the various repercussions therein.

We meet a lone male along the way, the saturnine Zezulia (Sergey Kalantay), who laments the lack of interest anyone shows him after becoming the latest person to disappear among similar aqueous circumstances. The woozy and watery narrative goes on to introduce a creepy doll with human hair, a monstrously-mutated-toad-beast, and a daily noontime murder at the clinic. It soon becomes clear that the water filtration plant is a place where the laws of fourth-dimensional time and space cease to be, and function more as a quasi-Bermuda Triangle of inexplicable, law-defying phenomena. At one point Gulshovsky meets a partner named Klavdiia (Darya Tregubova), who spent time in room 126 prior to her arrival. Together, they come closer to combining the fragmentary clues to assemble a cogent whole, but even at a total of 86 minutes, it takes a bit too long for the picture to come into sharp focus. And when the final portrait is ultimately revealed, only a semi-satisfactory conclusion can slightly atone for the mentally taxing toll of getting there.

Still, STRANGER is too compelling a sci-fi/horror curio to pass up when it eventually secures a release date. It may be a fashionably fractious fever-dream nearly impossible to decode, but the fun is in the attempt, while the imagery is too eerily memorable and the story is too unique to ignore. If you like your Lovecraftian horror with a dash of Lynchian surrealism, you’re bound to enjoy solving STRANGER’S Rubik’s Cube of a plot. All told, STRANGER is precisely what it promises: a movie more bizarre than you’re used to seeing!