Steppenwolf Review

Steppenwolf is a movie at war with itself. It doesn’t seem to know what to make of its own story, as what it seems to be saying shifts multiple times. On more than one occasion, Braiyuk (Berik Aytzhanov) responds to questions about death by laughing and pretending to fuck a large, floppy, plush dog. His brother (Yerken Gubashev) mockingly parrots Braiyuk’s words back at him moments before Braiyuk shoots him in an alluded to but unexplained previous arrangement. Late in the film, he kills a couple of bad guys, then does a small hip-waggling “dance” in a callback to his childhood. These little moments of absurdity clash especially hard with the setting, a brutal and barren area of Kazakhstan beset by a hierarchy of gangsters, with the unseen Taha lording over them all. It reads more as a post-apocalyptic landscape than a real place, dotted with burnt car husks and sparsely populated desert, and almost no people apart from Taha’s underlings. It’s as if they’re characters in a Borderlands game.

Which is fitting, as the central plot is essentially an escort mission. Timka (Timur Kim) has gone missing, and his mother Tamara (Anna Starchenko) is desperate to find him. Complicating that goal is her severely limited ability to communicate, a state which is never fully explained, but seems to be a combination of incredible trauma and an intellectual disability. She wanders into the nearby police compound just ahead of a terrorist attack, where escaped prisoner Braiyuk and a few of the terrorists agree to help after tricking her into offering a large monetary reward. Security cameras reveal he was taken by Max (Azamat Nigmanov), a notorious pimp and Timka’s father, which is only the beginning of their journey.

For the longest time, we’re unsure what’s animating Braiyuk. He’s not a moral person; we first meet him calmly torturing police prisoners, and his eventual backstory makes clear why he was given that role. Despite her later assertion that’s he’s “nice”, his treatment of Tamara is abhorrent, smacking her many times and yelling at her for her continuous incoherent mumbling. He doesn’t have any particular care for children apart from refusing to kill them. He displays no empathy at all, slaughtering anyone who gets in his way, sometimes even toying with them by presenting hope for survival before gunning them down. His own survival is his primary focus, and he’s damn good at it, turning into a one-man army as he sets his sights on taking down Taha.

The trouble is that watching a Terminator rip through anonymous gangsters can’t help but get tiresome after a spell, especially with little character growth to speak of. We’re to assume everyone he guns down is connected to Taha, but given sparse details as to how he knows that. As such, he appears to be killing indiscriminately, and just happens to be beset by evil on all sides. The scenarios get quite ridiculous, as some of his obstacles possess the accuracy of a Stormtrooper. By the time they must cross a heavily guarded bridge in a truck, the tension director Adilkhan Yerzhanov is aiming for is reduced to tedium. We know what he’s going to do, as well as the likely outcome. If Yerzhanov is trying to make a point about the terror of encountering such a force of nature, it’s undermined by how cool Braiyuk is when he leaps into action.

The audience’s engagement is not helped by painting Braiyuk as an antihero. That characterization is planted in our minds from the outset — the first thing we’re shown is a quote from the titular novel novel stating that our protagonist doesn’t fit into society. The irony, of course, is that this is a lawless land, stripped of all the normal trappings of a society, which is why he thrives. As they say, “In a mad world, only the mad are sane”. But it keeps us at a distance from him.

No narrative decision pushed me further away than his eventual complete loss of “patience” with Tamara. He admonishes her for babbling, then starts smacking her, hitting her harder and harder, before grabbing her by the shoulders and violently shaking her. The whole time, she’s visibly stressed out. She starts laughing as she’s hit, indicative of a pre-existing need to cope with such abuse. So we’re watching our protagonist force this woman into a traumatic place. Even worse? It works. By the end of this scene, and for the rest of the movie, she’s far more lucid and comprehensible, and stops mumbling about her missing son. She’s better able to express herself, and even partakes in the climactic violence. It’s not until after all this that she starts to show some affection for Braiyuk, asking if he’ll come live with her and Timka. This implies the movie isn’t using his behavior as an example of his inhumanity, but thinks he may have been right to behave this way.

All of that said, there is a slick sense of style permeating this film that makes it compelling enough. The movie takes its time, slowly developing the world and the relationships between the characters, never stopping to give us an exposition dump. The few bits of backstory we get are slipped in quite naturally, allowing us to piece together the various rumors we’ve been hearing since the beginning. Even the relationship between Braiyuk and Tamara is fascinating, as he’s uninterested in helping her but finds their goals lead them in the same direction, resulting in an interesting push and pull (more reason the aforementioned scene is so frustrating).

But the real star of the show is cinematographer Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev. From the very first shot, of a man smoking a cigarette with a bag over his head in front of a vast expanse of desert and mountains all draped in clouds, the visual beauty was obvious. It only gets more impressive as the film progresses. While the frequent cloud cover mutes the movie’s palette, it’s well-suited to a place so endlessly bleak. Ptyraliyev makes heavy use of reflections, sometimes to create uniquely composed two shots, sometimes to show us what a character sees while we watch their facial expression, and sometimes to peer around an obstacle. Any shiny surface is a candidate, from a window to cheap sunglasses to a shallow puddle. His compositions are never boring, and wonderfully utilize the wide open spaces and natural beauty of Kazakhstan’s Almaty Region. Even the less creative shots deserve praise for their execution, keeping your eyes glued to the screen as you eagerly take in the whole frame.

None of those strengths free the film from the feeling that it could have been so much more if it was willing to lean harder in one of its many directions. The care taken in crafting its vibe, minimal but effective score, and unorthodox characters play out in a predictable revenge movie. Little about the narrative stands out, and with so much time spent tracking down Timka, that cannot be ignored, even for its marvelous technical abilities. In an attempt to present catharsis at the end, it gives us an unclear climax and arbitrary twist, robbing it of any satisfaction once the violence subsides, and leaving the audience feeling cold and confused.