The Stoker

Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume whatever corpses the local criminal gang brings in.

That they have such immediate, unceremonial access is less the result of The Stoker inhabiting a world of absolute lawlessness, both literal and moral – that’s practically a given with Balabanov – than because the furnace is presided over by the vulture-thin stoker of the title, Ivan (Mikhail Skryabin), who reached the rank of major in the Afghan war in which bandit-in-chief Misha (Alexander Mosin) served as his sergeant. Skryabin’s from Yakutia, an Easterner whose bird-like face (main picture, above) seems to keep its own secrets even though most of his wits went in wartime concussion; his obsession in his fireside dotage is rewriting an almost mythic story of past Russian adventurism in Tsarist Yakutia.

It’s plotting – and killing – virtually by numbers

The latter subtext offers a tantalising aside in a story that otherwise repeats material for Balabanov, who’s best known for his two Brother films from the end of the 1990s, starring the charismatic Sergei Bodrov Jr as a nationally-popular criminal chancer hero. The Stoker came out a decade later in 2010, and there's an unsettling feeling that Balabanov used the intervening years to remove much of the energy that characterised the earlier films, refining down what’s left to a nihilism so finely pointed as to be almost parodic, a demonic fairy-tale if you like. It’s plotting – and killing – virtually by numbers, as a simple story unfolds involving the daughters of the two former comrades, one, Sasha, a beautiful easterner (Aida Tumutova), the other, Masha (Anna Korotayeva), a dumpy Russian. Plot denouement, such as it is, comes from the fact that they unwittingly share a lover, the silent hit-man nicknamed “Bizon” (Yuri Matveev), who’s right at home in a movie in which words themselves come few and far between.

It’s hard to know what speaks instead in The Stoker, except for a last trace, like some relic from another generation, of retribution asserted by its hero against the odds (Skryabin dressed for revenge, pictured right). It’s a frozen landscape with exteriors shot by Alexander Simonov from distances, with a repeating formality that is also there in almost hypnotically bland background music from local electropop star Didula. Balabanov has taken this cinematic stylisation to an extreme. He’s a director of enormous talent who’s never going to make comfortable films, so the result remains compelling, and at around 85 minutes attention doesn’t falter particularly, but the verve of the earlier films has gone. For all the flames of the furnace, the sharpness of The Stoker's light seems somehow dulled.

Watch the trailer for The Stoker