Because this film really excels at playing the audience response. When Jovan is enslaved early on and proffered as a stud in a bizarre nuptial to a bride to be (Isidora Simijonovic) the suitors are decimated by the bride’s brother as part of the selection. It’s so very alien that you keep butting heads with the assertion that this is still Earth, or, more specifically, the Western Balkans.
What Nemanja Ceranic does here is something George Miller perhaps never quite got the hang of with Mad Max; presenting the granular, low-level horror of a generations-long disaster. In Mad Max, the apocalypse is largely a colorful prop. Here, despite hiding away in the past, it feels much more substantially like the point.
The credit for much of this must go to the relentlessly clever production design of Damjan Paranosic. We constantly think we are watching just another science fiction movie, perhaps set somewhere far, far away, and then we see a totally recognizable production car. The effect is shocking. Everything is so different it feels like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. The broken, brutish order is more easily comparable with Aleksei German’s Hard to be a God, rather than most post-apocalyptic action fare.
“The action is meticulous and fast…”
The outlandish and beautifully conceived costumes by Ruzica Bukvicwe are a motley melange of rags, armor and warpaint, and they foreground the warped energy and theatrics of these people perfectly. The action is meticulous and fast, and is captured with gloomy clarity by cinematographer Igor Marovic.
The cast is terrific, all Serbian and so pretty much unrecognizable to anyone outside the Balkans. But the film was shot in English, and the delivery is clear and dramatic, with very little of the fluff or flutter from very occasional dubbing that we got in the spaghetti westerns (which this seems to draw on heavily, not least Once Upon a Time in the West).
But whereas Sergio Leone’s masterpiece was focused on the war between a dying world and an emerging one, here we seem to have a world that just keeps dying. It’s a terrific exemplar of world cinema in the 21st century and one of the best science fiction films I’ve seen in years. Highly recommended.
