Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Kazakh revenge thriller dares us to care for the year’s most chilling psychopath
A handcuffed man stands alone in a desert, coolly smoking a cigarette beneath a blinding prisoner’s hood. Is he a prisoner, enduring a last request? As we pull back, we reveal the carnage has long since stopped–policemen wash blood off of riot shields as the “prisoner” boards a nearby police van; he isn’t a captive, but seemingly complicit in what’s just happened, a wolf among sheep.
Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Steppenwolf unfurls a grisly portrait of this man’s ways of coping with life amidst a bloody unnamed civil war. Berik Aitzhanov’s Brajyuk is a convict-turned-interrogator, channeling years of personal trauma into the gruesome methods he uses to extract information from whoever the authorities unleash him upon. Brajyuk is disturbingly adept at self-preservation, puppeteering those around him into taking his place against rampaging firing squads or rival gangs to eke out another day.
When his police station endures a deadly raid by gangsters working for crime lord Taha, Brajyuk’s unexpected savior is the dazed, stuttering Tamara (Anna Starchenko). She’s searching for her lost son Timka, who Taha’s men seemingly captured; however, Tamara’s pleas have gone ignored by the strained, corrupt police force. Bonded together, Brajyuk finds himself unable to shake Tamara’s traumatized presence–but Tamara’s search for her son may help Brajyuk get one last chance at revenge.
While the idea of finding a reason to live amidst an apocalyptic world has been well-tread territory in stories across the globe, Steppenwolf roots such tropes in viscerally realistic and contemporary territory, along with daring its audience to empathize with one of the cruelest characters of the year. Yerzhanov’s unrelentingly bleak world, part of an ongoing, disconnected saga of films, retains echoes of the fall of civilization in the first Mad Max film by way of The Searchers–yet its violence feels more cruel and unpredictable, more Bela Tarr or Cormac McCarthy than George Miller and John Ford. The desolate steppes are defined by their upended, burning cars and jarring bursts of gunfire; there’s no attempt to contextualize the carnage around us beyond one of succeeding marauders and failing lawmen. There’s no time to create an alt persona rife with found objects and ornamental imagery when you could catch a stray bullet and bleed out in a foggy field. Much like Alex Garland’s Civil War earlier this year, this deliberate muddying of social or political waters strips away our usual methods of taking empathetic sides; rather, such wartime brutality feels like the status quo of this world. Yerzhanov implies that to endure this hundred-minute ordeal of following a maniac like Brajyuk, we must, like Tamara, extract whatever humanity we can from him–even if it feels as difficult as getting blood from a stone.
What makes Steppenwolf such a remarkable film is how Yerzhanov makes us care so deeply about Berik Aitzhanov’s unrepentant psychopath. At first, it seems like an impossible feat, as Brajyuk cackles like a hyena after dispatching nameless thugs with nothing more than a paperweight and a pair of scissors. Thrust into these chance sequences of John Wick-ian violence, one can’t help but feel like Steppenwolf confronts our primal desire to live in a world stripped of law and order with the brutal acts necessary to survive within it. Yet playing off of Starchenko’s stoic Tamara, we grow to understand and appreciate the jet-black humor Brajyuk adopts to cope with countless horrors; what’s more, his abusive outbursts and relentless drive for isolation give way to reveal a psyche deeply ravaged by the terrors of war. To endure the equally cruel world around him, Brajyuk’s ethos has crystallized into the idea that “goodness is no longer necessary.” It’s a powerhouse performance from Aitzhanov, able to evoke gut-busting laughter as much as a repulsive recoil in viewers as he plumbs this leading character’s dark depths.
It’s well worth noting that Tamara isn’t just there to be a mute foil for Brajyuk’s catharsis. Starchenko plays Tamara just as much as a victim of this cruel world as Brajyuk–and her journey from passive victim to actively resisting such horror inspires viewers to believe in the faith and goodness that Brajyuk deems so useless. Tamara’s repeated demands to find Timka risk losing viewers in a blur of semantic satiation; however, Anna Starchenko imbues her heroine with impeccable comic timing, heart-wrenching loss, and unshakable courage with the barest amount to do on screen.
Yerzhanov also finds such stunning visual poetry amid the desolation and bloodshed throughout Steppenwolf. This bleak world is just so beautifully realized, from crates of illegally harvested organs appearing out of a ghostly fog-drenched field like some depraved treasure to unearthly glowing explosions against stunning sunset gradients. Such flames also play against Tamara’s and Brajyuk’s eyes to bring out her inner fire, revealing how both actors and director unearth hope from the rubble of such nihilistic depravity.
One of my favorite sentiments by Stanley Kubrick culminates in the idea that “no matter how vast the darkness, we must create our own light;” Steppenwolf is a film that follows in that spirit by way of Cormac McCarthy in truly putting such tempered idealism to the test, subjecting its audience to wave after wave of brutal violence to dramatize just how much hope truly matters. Steppenwolf is such a bloodthirsty, cruel film–yet it’s unexpectedly, magically one of the most empathetic journeys of the year.
Steppenwolf had its North American premiere at Fantasia Fest 2024. A United States premiere is set for Fantastic Fest 2024 in September, with a 2025 release planned by Arrow Films.
