Prolific writer-director Adilkhan Yerzhanov has become an international film festival fixture over the last decade with his tragicomic depictions of his native Kazakhstan as a kind a lightly surreal Wild East, where rampant crime and corruption go unpunished against a widescreen canvas of gorgeous pastoral landscapes. Yerzhanov’s latest cheerfully bleak evisceration of his post-Soviet homeland, Assault is a typically sardonic quasi-thriller about a plucky gang of small-town anti-heroes fighting back when armed terrorists take over their local high school. Echoes of the tragic 2004 Beslan siege and last year’s Kazan school shootings are unavoidable, despite a prominent disclaimer in the opening credits of any intended real-world parallels.
World premiering online at IFFR this week, Assault strikes a more seriocomic note than much of Yerzhanov’s previous work, lacking the noir-ish bite of A Dark, Dark Man (2019) or the sunny cinephile charm of Yellow Cat (2020), which Kazakhstan submitted to the Oscars. But the director’s signature voice still comes though strongly in the knowingly deadpan tone, poker-faced performances and majestically filmed snowscape backdrop. Beneath the wintry surface bleakness, the reliably absurd farce of human vanity and petty selfishness persists. Further festival slots and specialist platforms should show interest after Rotterdam, cementing Yerzhanov’s position as one of Kazakhstan’s most acclaimed and exportable auteurs.
Assault initially wrong-foots audience expectations with a tense, chilling set-up that promises more of an action thriller than black comedy. In the remote mountain town of Karatas, a fictional backwater that features in several Yerzhanov films, a heavily armed terrorist group wearing sinister white masks descend on a snowbound school, easily slipping inside past bickering teachers and clownishly drunken guards. When the first shots are fired, most staff and students manage to flee. But nervous maths teacher Tazschy (Azamat Nigmanov), fresh from a humiliating public spat with his ex-wife Lena (Aleksandra Revenko) over plans for custody of their son Daniyal (Timur Muratov), is caught off guard. Leaving a class full of children locked in the school, including Daniyal, he bolts for the exit.
As the school siege becomes a hostage situation, a special tactics team is summoned, but their arrival is delayed by heavy snow. Under pressure from desparate parents, angry co-workers and incompetent local police, Tazschy confesses his cowardly act of desertion. But he also gets an unlikely shot at redemption by joining a motley platoon of amateur commandos bent on storming the school and shooting the terrorists. Lena, boorish physical education teacher Sopa (Berik Aitzhanov), dim-witted handyman Turbo (Daniyar Alshinov) and other inept accomplices join the mission. They begin with comically clueless firearms training on the vast snowy tundra, a beautifully shot sequence which mainly serves to expose most of the team’s hollow machismo and infantile rivalry.
Punctuated by an ominous countdown to the storming of the school, Assault toys ironically with thriller and western conventions, deflating each pulse-racing crescendo by stressing the neurotic, terrified, self-serving nature of these reluctant anti-heroes. In Yerzhanov’s morally compromised universe, plot is chiefly an incidental device designed to highlight universal human flaws, life lessons are rarely learned, and explanatory context is thin on the ground.
The final bloody showdown is presented as an almost slapstick anti-climax, and comes with a bitter punchline. Anyone hoping for a cathartic Die Hard resolution may feel cheated, but seasoned fans of Yerzhanov’s downbeat satirical voice will enjoy the reliably sour aftertaste of existential despair. And yet, for all its world-weary cynicism, Assault is a consistently seductive sensory experience. The director’s regular camera maestro Aidar Sharipov shoots these snowy Steppes vistas with a painterly sense of composition and measured, precise, elegantly slow pans. Galymzhan Moldanazar’s pulsing, percolating electronic score heightens this sense of other-worldly, menacing beauty.
Director, screenwriter: Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Cast: Azamat Nigmanov, Aleksandra Revenko, Nurlan Batyrov, Daniyar Alshinov, Berik Ajtzhanov, Nurbek Mukushev
Cinematography: Aidar Sharipov
Editing: Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Music: Galymzhan Moldanazar
Producers: Alexander Plotnikov, Boris Khlebnikov, Natalia Drozd, Olga Khlasheva, Serik Abashev
Production companies: Short Brothers (Kazakhstan), Look Film (Russia), Forest Film (Russia)
World sales: Riverlet, Paris
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Big Screen Competition)
In Kazakh, Russian
90 minutes
