Fantasia Film Festival 2024 ‘Steppenwolf’ Review – A Violently Mesmerizing Kazakh Action Thriller
A town finds itself overrun with bloodshed. The police are at war with the locals, rioting plagues the streets, and vehicles are nothing more than blockades engulfed in flames. In that town, Tamara (Anna Starchenko) lives with her son Timka.
The violence has taken its toll on Tamara and she’s completely shellshocked: she stutters, mumbles to herself, and walks pigeon-toed. Tamara can barely form a full sentence. Timka goes missing and Tamara sets off to look for him.
A man known only as Brajyuk (Berik Aizhanov) has been brought to this town to make people talk. Brajyuk may have once been a police officer, but now he is known as a confession specialist. He tortures people gruesomely to get them to speak and then kills them anyway because he feels like it. Brajyuk is a psychopath on a vicious revenge streak.
Tamara’s search for Timka aligns with Brajuk’s quest for vengeance. He promises to find Timka, but his relentless nature makes his motivations questionable.
Steppenwolf is a brutal action thriller from Kazakhstan. The majority of the film is people getting shot, stabbed, tortured, burned alive, and maimed to death in general. Born from the ashes of what could have once been a humane town are two drastically different individuals: a seemingly helpless woman searching for her son and a man who has gone crazy searching for bloodthirsty retribution.
The film begins with Brajyuk, who is nameless for half the film, in this open field in the middle of nowhere. He’s handcuffed with a bag over his head, but he’s smoking a cigarette. He walks past police officers cleaning blood from their shields as he gets back onto what looks like a prison bus that’s part of a five-car convoy that makes its way towards Tamara’s town.
Brajyuk is searching for a man named Taha; everyone who is rioting and killing that isn’t a cop seems to work for him. Taha is kidnapping children and harvesting their organs. Five years ago, Taha killed Brajyuk’s family and burned them to death.
Berik Aizhanov is wildly unhinged as Brajyuk. In one sequence he dances in the street while Tamara checks the corpse of a child on the side of the road. They find this giant stuffed dog that tags along in the truck for the second half of the film. Its sole purpose is for Brajyuk to act like it’s going down on him at every opportunity.
Brajyuk also tortures without remorse. A pimp named Max supposedly knows where Timka was taken, so Brajyuk forces him to change a flat tire on a car. Once Max is under the car, Brajyuk releases the car jack, grabs the other hand, extends it across a car tire lying on the ground, and whacks Max’s fingers with a hammer. As Max screams that Brajyuk should be asking him questions since he’ll tell him whatever he wants, Brajyuk replies, “What? What questions? I don’t have any.”
Steppenwolf is a film that is not for the weak at heart. It’s a hopelessly bleak film full of unlikeable characters. Anna Starchenko stutters and stumbles her way into an exceptionally memorable performance while Berik Aizhanov devours anyone he shares the screen with. As Brajyuk, Berik Aizhanov is a chaotic bulldozer who plows through everyone in his way and laughs hysterically while he does it.
It’s war, revenge, Steppenwolf is torturing your enemy until they can’t see straight, mocking their painful cries, and making them bleed until you’re satisfied. This film burns itself into your brain with its mesmerizing portrayal of brutality.
Steppenwolf (2024), Blue Finch Film Releasing
PROS
- Berik Aizhanov is ruthlessly great
- A powerfully bleak film
CONS
- May seem pointless
- Ends almost exactly as it began
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