Apocalypse. Apocalypse never goes through any fundamental changes. But people, particularly those who are impacted by it, do. The country of Kazakhstan has long had its name cemented in film history with the genre-bending mockumentary Borat. As it seems, cinema from Kazakhstan hasn’t rater made its way to the North America, which is peculiar for the ninth largest country. Sometimes it just takes one movie to put a country’s name on the map. Steppenwolf is the film that is bound to change and bring about a whole new audience to any nation’s filmography.
One fateful day, in the war-torn city where she lives, Tamara Starchenko’s son disappears without a trace. The shell shocked, semi catatonic, or is it merely autistic Tamara finds the police interrogator Brajyuk (Birek Aitzhanov) and offers him money in exchange for her missing child. Papete in his style and his propensity to violence scarcely touch Tamara. They navigate through inciters and high water leaving behind a strew of torn apart corpses in their wake. Will they make it in the journey or will it be the end of the journey due to Brajyuk’s antics?
The approach to the anti-hero image in Steppenwolf is unique and original. He is an interesting character whom director Adilkhan Yerzhanov depicts rather well. It is not just bloody adventure, which is also present, steppenwolf aims at and manages to address many concepts. (Admittedly, I have no idea of what the socio-political situation is in Kazakhstan and therefore am not sure how accurate this movie is in regards to the cultural critique of a particular place.) What I am sure is that Steppenwolf is unapologetic in its portrayal of political violence.
In such a profoundly bellicose world, be it Kazakhstan, a migrant hotel in Rotherham, or a few sore losers with red hats on, Steppenwolf reflects the reality of this world to one and all, the good and the bad and, well, the very bad indeed.
There is something captivating about the contrast between Tamara and Brajyuk. The working Anna Starchenko and Birek Aitzhanov deserve awards as their characters in the film make them excruciating to bear as one enjoyed seeing them and feeling pain at the same time. Tamara is a weary image of peace and hope, a splash of light long extinguished by hatred and wars, war has rendered useless. One can predict the identity issue, the age, or the problem that she seems to have, but that does not matter. This is where Tamara comes in, a Johnson in whom many can find recognition, and whom we can only speculate has been that way because of the violence she is in. On the other hand, you have Brajyuk. An all-nonsense and no-nonsense man with gratitude seeks only vendetta and a cigarette between his teeth. This cheerful personality is bullied by his propensity to deep violence; and in an action film, every redemptive scene comes together with a unified, sickening bastion of violence.
Steppenwolf utilizes gruesome yet beautiful practical effects. The film invokes varied emotions in the audience bringing them to eventual self-contemplation. Even though the credits have started rolling, beautiful landscapes of the film still remain filled with the blood of the enemies of the King, and the viewers feel both horror and sadness as somewhere in a fugal state. Films like this are, once in a lifetime, a film, like every film should be ‘a film of its time.’ Steppenwolf straddles on the verge of what could be a horror action drama, and never settles down to just one. The narrative moves as disorderly as war. In more toned terms, Steppenwolf is not the film that America deserves, it is the film America has to have, but summer’s body sentiment is certainly not in it.
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