Director/Screenplay – Alexey Kazakov, Producers – Alexey Kazakov, Sergey Kornikhin & Sofia Kvashilava, Photography – Evgeniy Kozlov, Music – Nadezhda Gritskevich, Visual Effects – AmalgamaVFX (Supervisors – Vladimir Lanzin & Sergei Vasiliev), Prosthetic Makeup – Alexey Ivchenko, Production Design – Alexandra Fatina. Production Company – Droog Drooga Films/Okko Studios.
Cast
Semyon Serzin (Andrey), Marina Vasileva (Olya), Aleksandra Revenko (Mara), Anatoliy Zhuravlyov (Konstantin), Stepan Devonin (Kirill), Maria Abramova (Little Mara)
Plot
Andrey goes to seek the aid of the witch Mara. He is wanting to erase his wife Olya’s memory of an incident in which burglars broke into their house and raped her, causing her to lose their baby. Mara asks Andrey to move into her apartment with Olya while she is away. From a distance, Mara’s spell begins to affect Olya. However, Andrey then finds that one of the side effects of this is that Olya has lost all memory of him. When he tries to get Mara to reverse, she cannot be found.
In the late 2010s and into the 2020s, Russian dark fantasy and science-fiction has become one of the most exciting new fields of fantastic cinema in the world with works such as The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2016), The Queen of Spades (2016), The Blackout (2019), The Ninth (2019), Sputnik (2020), The Superdeep (2020) and that only seems to have scratched the surface. (See Russian Cinema).
Side Effect comes from Alexey Kazakov who has been almost exclusively a comedy director since his first appearance in 2012. Amidst this, Kazakov has made entries in the popular Yolki series and created the Gorko films, along with Super Bobrova (2016) and sequel about a regular family who gain superpowers.
A number of these Russian dark fantasy works centre around Witches. I recently reviewed Dark Spell (2021) about a jilted girlfriend casting a spell to bring her boyfriend back that has horrific consequences. There was also The Widow (2020) in which an emergency crew encounter a vengeful witch inhabiting a forest. The work that Side Effect comes closest to is Baba Yaga, Terror of the Dark Forest (2020) that came out around eight months earlier in the same year in which the witch from Russian folklore appears as a nanny who can steal people’s memories.
Aleksandra Revenko as the witch Mara
Side Effect starts extremely well. It has the bewitching presence of Aleksandra Revenko who looks eerily beguiling and alien with her high-cheekboned features and piercing eyes. She lives in an old apartment that is filled with multiple rooms spilling over with exotic greenery and ornamentation. The scenes where Semyon Serzin is invited over and then moves in with Marina Vasileva have a fascination. These start to move into a deepening eeriness where the apartment is filled with appearances of horses and a ghost girl (Maria Abramova) giving warnings. And then comes the jolt scene where Marina Vasileva abruptly does not recognise Semyon and he suddenly finds that her entire memory of him appears to have been erased.
In these scenes, the film sets up a highly promising first and second act but then loses the plot. The rest of the show is about much running around between locations where the witch lives and then a series of portals in other rooms of the apartment that seem to lead somewhere (it is not clear where). The witch’s lair with its walls in glowing UV paint does look quite striking. There is much running around here but the battle and struggle is not always a clear one in terms of what is happening.
