Set in 2017 German Jr’s conjures up the picture of a planet that has gone wrong and an eerie expectancy that this just might be the end of our world. It reflects a global malaise that is very much of the here and now already in 2015 extending existing trends to their logical end. The characters constantly sniffle or bleed from the nose in a suggested reaction to an unspecified environmental disaster that no one acknowledges. The sky has become an unnatural and murky dome and the climate of global warming has already arrived.   An explanation is hinted at early on in the film when the characters look up into the sky to see advertising projected onto the clouds and confirm that the same thing is also being done in Tokyo and Shanghai. The total and utter triumph of global commercialism and greed has seized even the sky itself to be used for sales.

German Jr lays out his surreal mosaic of dialogue and images in seven episodes each chapter titled and with different characters that revolve around the skeleton of a skyscraper where work has been abandoned because the oligarch who was backing it has run out of money. The landscape is a ruined one where the economy has been destroyed and people are expecting a great global war to follow.

In the first episode a Kyrgyz worker played by Karim Pakachakov who does not speak English and has been presumably been left behind when work on the skyscraper he was working on was halted wonders in this surreal world trying to find his place.

Next we see the children of the financier of the skyscraper, Sasha played by Viktoria Korotkova and Danya played by Viktor Bugakov, who have returned home after his death. Their father was a man of vision but everything he tried to build has been destroyed or is breaking down. There are hints that their father might have also been connected to organized crime.

Other chapters and characters introduce us to a real estate lawyer involved in the construction, a pompous intellectual who now works as a guide at a state museum and dresses in historical costume played by Merab Ninidze, a group of drug addicts living in a wasted building and one of their number tries unsuccessfully to rescue a 12 year old girl who has been kidnapped by the mafia for use as a sex slave, and the depressed architect of the half finished skyscraper played Louis Franck who wanders around questioning the uselessness of art and his own existence.

German Jr plays with time and image overlapping the time frames and dialogues of the various characters in different chapters that sometimes meet and repeat earlier sequences from a different point of view.

The images conjured up by DoPs, Evgeniy Privin and Sergey Mikhalchuk are a towering achievement on their own and create a unique landscape for the characters to inhabit.

This is a sprawling non-linear film that has to be more soaked up than understood but it is worth the effort although to obtain the full impact it is probably necessary to sit through its two hour plus length more than once.

It is especially gratifying to see in this time of international conflict that the film is a successful and positive cooperation between Russia, Ukraine and Poland.

Director: Alexey German Jr.

Cast: Louis Franck, Merab Ninidze, Viktoriya Korotkova, Chulpan Khamatova, Viktor Bugakov, Karim Pakachakov, Konstantin Zeliger, Anastasiya Melnikova, Piotr Gasowski

Russian Federation, Ukraine, Poland