‘Unclenching the Fists’ Review: The Cost of Freedom

The Russian director Kira Kovalenko’s moody, miserablist drama “Unclenching the Fists” captures a turning level within the lifetime of Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a younger lady trapped below her father’s thumb.

The chilly mountain area the place they reside is in a mining city in North Ossetia, a Russian republic within the North Caucasus, an space nonetheless uncooked with the reminiscences of civil warfare and extremist violence.

Zaur (Alik Karaev) is a possessive and domineering single mum or dad, forbidding Ada from sporting fragrance ought to it appeal to male consideration, and — most alarmingly — locking his daughter and youngest son into their shared condominium within the evenings, solely permitting them to exit when he sees match. Distrustful of establishments, Zaur refuses to permit Ada to get the therapy she wants for accidents sustained throughout a terrorist assault, forcing the younger lady to put on grownup diapers.

Ada rebels as finest she will, assembly up together with her dimwitted pseudo-boyfriend, Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov), between shifts at a neighborhood grocery retailer. An alternative for liberation emerges when her large brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev), who left to seek out work in a metropolis, pays the household a go to.

With its steely colour palette and brooding, tight-lipped performances, the movie typically trades in art-house cinema clichés — and its relentless ambiance of doom and gloom reduces the characters to mere victims of implacable forces. Ada’s psychological tumult is captured in intimate close-ups and fluttering digicam actions, whereas the absence of a rating enhances the movie’s uneasy temper of pent-up rage and stifling despair.

That stated, a remaining act pivot renders this fraught household portrait into one thing a lot gentler and empathetic than the primary half of the movie would recommend, even when Ada’s quest for freedom in the end feels extra not possible than ever.

Unclenching the Fists
Not rated. In Ossetian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi.