Dead Daughters Review

The film opens with a young woman, Vera, sitting alone in her car. A strange, battered man leaps in unannounced, raving about some force in pursuit of him, insisting that Vera take him someplace safe and threatening violence unless she does. Vera complies and is told a wild, fantastical story about a madwoman who killed her three young daughters years earlier and was herself seemingly killed by her childrens’ ghosts. Their hunger not sated the ghosts have subsequently been on a killing spree, tracking the last person to see their latest victim alive for three days and meting out punishment should that witness do anything wrong in that span. Vera’s not a stupid girl and she knows a crazy man when she sees one and so she ditches him at her earliest opportunity and relays the story to a quintet of five visiting friends to try and calm her nerves after the frightening incident.

But here’s the thing. The crazy guy wasn’t crazy after all. He was exactly correct. And Vera’s abandonment of him in his time of need is more than enough to bring ghostly wrath down upon herself. This, in turn, places her five friends directly in the line of fire. They were all with her on the final night of her life, they all left together, and they thus share the unfortunate tag of last to see her alive between them. They now must survive the next three days.

Strengths first.

Dead Daughters is a stunning film on a technical level. Ruminov has an incredible eye and clearly loves the post-industrial landscapes of suburban Moscow. He shoots his adopted home - he is originally from the country’s far eastern coastal city of Vladivostok - with an eye that captures the beauty of decay, employing a heavy color filters throughout and very often shooting at night with only natural light sources. The film simply looks gorgeous. And as good as it looks it sounds even better. The sound design took months to complete and it shows. Audio is likely the most important factor in establishing mood in film and Ruminov very clearly understands that using audio effects and music to build tension, establish his environments and - frequently -convey information to his audience without having to place explicit images on the screen. What you feel is often more effective than what you see and Ruminov plays that card exceptionally well without playing the low end cheat of simply ramping up the volume to make people jump. Technical skill, however, is pointless without an active imagination and a wealth of ideas to back it up and Ruminov has both of these as well. The central premise is solid and the film is littered with impressive set pieces spiced with a mordant sense of humor.

And now the down side. And it should be said here that while these are issues that may impact viewer enjoyment of the film most are so central to the point of what Ruminov is trying to say and accomplish here that it is hard to refer to them as weaknesses.

First, the film is not about the ghosts but about the quintet of friinds dealing with what is likely their final three days. And to say what he wants to say with his characters Ruminov needs them to know what is happening to them and so he lays out the entire scenario in the film’s opening minutes. You know essentially everything there is to know about the Daughters from the moment Vera finishes her story and only one of the characters makes any attempt to learn any more. This move allows Ruminov to do what he wants with his characters but it also removes most of the film’s narrative drive. There’s nothing for the quintet to do, essentially, and nothing for them to learn because they already know everything and know that the situation is essentially hopeless. Feeding into this scenario further - and likely a root cause of much of the public backlash amongst the film’s detractors - is how Ruminov portrays his lead characters. He may shoot Moscow with a loving touch but he is far less kind to Muscovites of his own generation, portraying them as lazy, passive, isolated and caught up in the sheer banality of their lives. When the blood starts to flow it flows not so much because they’ve done anything wrong as because they simply can’t be bothered to do anything particualrly right. Or much of anything at all, for that matter. And while this may be a biting piece of social commentary it is hard to spin high drama out of. While there are some other issues - spreading screen time evenly amongst his five largely disconnected characters rather than sharpening the focus onto only one or two makes it difficult to build tension and maintain pace, for instance - these two are at the core of the negative reaction the film has received.

Dead Daughters is a mixed piece of work but one that clearly marks Ruminov as a very significant talent to watch. It is the writer / director / producer’s first attempt at truly feature length film making - his earlier efforts are longer than typical shorts but shy of full feature length running time - and, like he says of his own ghostly creations at one point of the film, he doesn’t yet fully understand his own strengths. He is a dazzling technician and a very strong idea man but could stand to work with an experienced outside editor, one without such a personal investment in all of the footage shot who can focus him on the big picture more than the individual moments, to help him a bit in the assembly stages.