Winner of several festival awards in Russia, “My Murderer” was also an official selection of the Asian World Film Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes. As Sergei Anashkin mentions in his introduction to the Breakthrough Program's focus on Yakutian cinema, the director, Kostas Marsan, was part of a new generation of local filmmakers that emerged during the previous the 2010s, who “broke away from the “insular thinking” of the past, reorienting from an internal audience to the external one”.
“My Murderer” is streaming for free as part of the Terrestrial Voices program
Djulus is a young detective who has been assigned a seemingly simple domestic murder case. His research, however, reveals more and more that this is not as easy as it initially seemed, as former fugitives, a sister who is in constant fear, a weird witness next door, and finally, illegal mining and gold trafficking soon enter the equation. Furthermore, his girlfriend is fed up with the continuous breaking of promises, while his boss pushes him to close the case so he can go into his planned vacations. The pressure piles up, and Djulus eventually realizes that the solution is far away from the city, to a settlement of gold miners.
Kostas Marsan directs a movie whose narrative progresses in a very interesting fashion, since every discovery, every person Djulus talks to, seems to unveil another aspect of the case in an ever moving forward story. The result is rather entertaining, essentially retaining interest from beginning to end, also due to the relatively fast pace implemented by Konstantin Danilov's editing. At the same time, this approach allows Marsan to analyze his main character to the fullest, showing his reactions in a series of different situations. Truth be told, the story goes a bit too far after a point, with all those elements included, probably in an effort to also include some social commentary, while the expected plot twist is not exactly shattering, but even these issues actually fit the general aesthetics, which move towards a noir/pulp direction.
This last aspect also benefits the most by Luba's presence (the aforementioned sister) , a character that seems like a complete victim but is also evident that she is hiding something. Galina Tikhonova does an adequate job in the role, in a film though, that suffers from a series of “wooden” performances, unfortunately including Vyacheslav Lavernov's in the role of the protagonist, who is actually much better in his silences than when he is delivering lines.
Where the movie truly thrives, however, is its cinematography, with DP Iskander Ivanov capturing a series of impressive images, both in the rural and the urban settings, with a number of panoramic ones in particular being quite memorable. The noirish aesthetics also benefit the most by his framing in the interior shots, with the introductory one being indicative, with the same applying to the overall quality of coloring.
“My Murderer” is an interesting film, definitely very entertaining, and Marsan seems to have a lot of good ideas, also including the way he implements small moment of humor in the narrative, in a pulp style that is intriguing to watch from a Yakutian production. Some improvement in the acting and the story could definitely have benefited the film though.
