Gogol: The Beginning (2017) poster

Gogol: The Beginning (2017)

Rating:

(Gogol: Nachalo)


Russia. 2017.

Crew

Director – Egor Baranov, Screenplay – Kim Belov, Aleksey Chupov, Aleksey Karulov, Tokhon Kornov, Philip Konyashov & Natalya Merkulova, Producers – Valeriy Fyodorovoch, Artur Janibekyan, Evgeniy Nikishov & Alexander Tsekalo, Photography – Sergei Trofinov, Music – Ryan Otter, Production Design – Elena Zhukova. Production Company – Sreda.

Cast

Alexander Petrov (Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol), Oleg Menshikov (Yakov Petrovich Guro), Yevgeny Stychkin (Alexander Khristoforovich Bing), Taisiya Vilkova (Lisa Danishevskaya), Artyom Tkachenko (Alexey Danishevsky), Yevgeny Sytiy (Yakim), Julia Franz (Oksana), Yan Tsapnik (Dr Leopold Leopoldovich Bomgart), Vitaly Kovalenko (Investigator Kovleiskiy), Sergey Badyuk (Vakula), Artyom Suchkov (Tesak), Beata Makovsky (Khavronya), Dmitry Bykovsky-Romashov (Solopiy Cherevik)


Plot

Murders in Dikanka:- St Petersburg, 1829. Nikolai Gogol is a scribe aiding a police investigator. He is also a writer who has published a book of poetry but is so ashamed he buys up all copies he can find and burns them. As top investigator Yakov Petrovich Guro comes to a crime scene, Gogol goes into a trance and begins automatic writing, providing clues that lead to the apprehension of the guilty party. When Yakov announces that he is travelling to the village of Dikanka to investigate a case, Gogol offers to accompany him as his scribe. In the village, they must deal with the mystery of several girls who have been murdered by the possibly supernatural figure of a hooded horseman. The Red Cape:- Gogol stays on in Dikanka to solve the murders. A housewife who is consorting with another man has their tryst interrupted as a red cape is left at the door. The two of them are then found murdered. The local police chief arrests the lover but after talking to him, Gogol is certain he is not the killer and that the killings are from a different party than the horseman killings. The ghost of the murdered woman continues to turn up to provide warnings.


In the late 2010s, Russian dark fantasy and science-fiction has become one of the most exciting new fields of fantastic cinema in the world with the likes of The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2016), The Queen of Spades (2016), The Ninth (2019), Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020), Sputnik (2020), The Superdeep (2020), The Widow (2020) and Dark Spell (2021) and that only seems to have scratched the surface. (See Russian Cinema).

Russian director Egor Baranov has had a modest output of films since appearing with Suicides (2012). He has also made Nightingale: The Robber (2012), Russia’s first erotic film Locust (2014) and the subsequent alien invasion film The Blackout (2019) and Resurrected (2023) about a resurrection process created by the Catholic Church.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) has become regarded as a major Russian writer. Gogol was writing around the same time as Edgar Allan Poe – although there is no indication he ever read Poe – and much of his work falls into the horror genre. His most famous work is the short story The Viy (1835) about a monk forced to spend the night in a church with a body as demonic forces gather around him. This has undergone a number of film adaptations with Black Sunday (1960), Viy (1967) and Viy (2014). Here Gogol has been used as a fictional character who becomes an Occult Investigator – it is an example of Real-Life People in Fiction.

Alexander Petrov as Nikolai Gogol in the village of Dikanka in Gogol The Beginning (2017)
Alexander Petrov as Nikolai Gogol in the village of Dikanka

Gogol: The Beginning appears to come from what started as a tv mini-series Gogol. I am not clear on the process of when they were aired but the mini-series ended up being repackaged as a series of theatrically released films, beginning with this and followed by Gogol: Viy (2018) and Gogol: A Terrible Vengeance (2018), and then aired as the tv series Gogol (2019). (It is quite possible I may be wrong about the order of events here).

Egor Baranov taps the whole Russian dark fantasy cycle. The film comes with some beautiful period setting and costume design, along with hyper-real images like that of the coach riding through the night outlined against a larger-than-life moon. There is a great opening where a peasant returns to his two comrades with a nude woman with a hood over her face as a prisoner. They are interrupted by a black hooded horseman with strange spikes emerging from behind his back who slaughters the men in short course with swords in heads or bodily impaling them to trees. The woman is freed by the horseman who promptly slits her throat.

The main failing of the film is the very nature of it being a TV Mini-Series that has been cut up as a series of films. A film gives you an expectation of an ending whereas what we have storywise here feels more like two episodes of a series. As the first episode comes to an end, you keep expecting the film to go in traditional directions such as wrapping up the murders and unveiling the identity of the horseman. By contrast, we find that the mystery about the horseman serves as the basis of an overarching premise for all three films while each episode has Gogol as a detective solving different mysteries. The stories have individual wrap-ups but the film frustrates in that the central drama that drives everything is left unresolved at the ending.


Trailer here


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