Out of Fantastic Fest, Yerkezhan Baizhan’s Ürei makes for one of the festival’s most depressing viewing experiences. It is deeply upsetting in tone and performance, mining themes of memory, regret, and powerlessness. The writer/director expands her six-minute short film into a pulverizing 80-minute tragedy. The Kazakhstan-set film rings with the shrill moan of death much like Mattie Do’s The Long Walk; both brutally excavate the darkest parts of human nature, where pain serves only one purpose: more pain. Grief also swirls like melted wax in a vat of acid. The horrors of Ürei lie resoundingly in real-world travesties of untreated mental decline and complicity in complacency.
Kalima (Akerke Kozaiyr) and her strict mother’s relationship hangs on by a thread. Aliya (Gulbahram Baybosynova) reprimands her 13-year-old daughter, seizes her phone, and even barks at her husband Askar (Asset Eszhan). They drive Kalima out to a small country village to spend some time with her grandmother Amina (Tynyshgul Sultanberdieva). Time away from the city and screens could do her a world of good. More than anything, it gives Kalima peace away from her finger-wagging mother. Amina wraps her in a giant, warm hug and offers her heaping plates of hot food.
But the trip swiftly goes sideways once Aliya and Askar leave. During the night, Kalima hears her grandmother crying out and wandering around the house. It’s a disturbing scene, and Amina shrugs it off the next morning. Things only get stranger from there. Amina’s faculties quickly deteriorate, and her sense of time and place slips further and further away. The past never really stays buried, and Kalima may be the one to pay the heavy price. Baizhan pulls out every last heartstring and severs them from the body with a rusted pair of kitchen scissors. Ürei is as nihilistic as they come, exposing unspoken truths and wallowing in raw misery.
Sultanberdieva delivers Oscar-worthy range with a performance so troubling that it’ll make you forget everything you think you know about the human condition. Her chemistry with young star Kozaiyr is magnetic and visceral, each tightening the screws on the emotional stakes until popping the seams. When the story passes the point of no return, the audience endures every ounce of Misery-like agony, and there’s no escaping the inevitable. Catharsis remains elusive, and the film will make you wish you were dead.
Yerkezhan Baizhan knits together a harrowing glimpse into human failure and lingering effects on loved ones. Ürei doesn’t give the viewer any room to breathe and never wastes a single frame. While the film could be read as unnecessarily bleak, it’s within such a sour, rotten state that it imparts wisdom about aging, how we treat the elderly, and where the blame should be placed. Some truths just don’t go down easily.
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