A Gentle Creature / Lahidna

A shy woman receives a package that had been addressed to her husband, who is unjustly imprisoned. She takes the package and sets off for the prison town on a thorny quest in a search for the truth. The town greets her with bureaucratic absurdity, criminal rituals, and senseless dreams.

Starting with My Joy (2010), Loznitsa has had a tendency to complicate his films’ plots with strange parallel storylines. However, in A Gentle Creature, he outdoes himself. Although the literary foundation of the film is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s plot, Loznitsa shifts it to a different time and adds phantasmagorical, Kafkaesque motifs. Moreover, A Gentle Creature feels the influence of various other filmmakers — from European instigators Buñuel and Ferreri to Soviet dissidents Gierman and Abuladze — more than any other film in Loznitsa’s filmography.

However, this cascade of allusions does not make A Gentle Creature a derivative work. On the contrary, it presents a unique international (co-production) type of cinematic style, which is well understood in both Western and Eastern Europe. Modern festival audiences from different cultures will equally grasp the film’s anti-totalitarian critique, whether it is aimed at the Leviathan of Putin’s Russia or the skeleton of the Communist Molokh.

The film was shot in Latvia in the second half of 2016, with the involvement of a Ukrainian production team. Like Loznitsa’s other films from the 2010s, A Gentle Creature participated in the Cannes Film Festival.