Why Don’t You Just Die!
It’s far from happy families at the Gennadievitch household as Matvei decides to pay a visit to introduce himself to his girlfriend’s father, Andrey; heavily built, bad tempered and by nature suspicious of unexpected callers because of his job as a senior police officer, Andrey has double reason to be cautious as he is a bent cop with a large cache of stolen cash in the apartment.
Add to the mix Tasha, Andrey’s submissive wife, adept at turning a blind eye, Olya, their resentful daughter, a barmaid and struggling actress whose greatest performances are in manipulation, and Andrey’s best friend and colleague, Yevgenich, grieving for his dead wife and emotionally volatile, and the scene is set for a particularly Russian brand of carnage and chaos.
The feature debut of writer/director Kirill Sokolov, Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni, literally Papa, Die) is an outrageous and bloody black comedy, an over-the-top drama of Muscovite family, duty, ambition, jealousy, clawhammers, power tools, shotguns and sofas stuffed full of American dollars, dirty bribe money lifted in a dirtier double cross.
With the saturated colour and vibrancy of the collaborations of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro along with, the camera often hovers directly above the action like a guardian angel with a strict policy of non-interference no matter how out of hand the situation becomes, but even in the heat of the moment Andrey is cool enough to realise that a tiled bathroom is the best place for an impromptu torture session, easily cleaned afterwards.
Built around broad manic characterisations and the madcap schemes of the tight cast, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Khaev, Elena Shevchenko, Evgeniya Kregzhde and Mikhail Gorevoy, the action is stop and start but the bold soundtrack keeps the momentum up, the grandeur of the Russian masters mixed with a touch of ska and punk.
Released on Blu-ray by Arrow, Why Don’t You Just Die! contains behind the scenes footage, a conversation with Kim Newman discussing the film in the context of neo noir, western showdowns and single location cinema, and four of Sokolov’s short films, Could Be Worse (Byvaet i khuzhe), The Outcome (Iskhod, literally Exodus), The Flame (Ogon) and Sisyphus is Happy (Sizif schastliv), continuing the themes of heartbreak, random violence, desperation and bizarre coincidences.
Why Don’t You Just Die! is released on Blu-ray on Monday 20th April
