The chief oddity in this oddly underpowered, anticlimactic and torpidly acted movie from Australian director Ariel Kleiman is the fact that it only comes to life with the final shot: an ingenious and macabre image, promising retributive violence. But that’s hardly worth the price of admission, and for audiences who have stuck with it that far, this flourish might just be something else to get frustrated about.
It’s set in a lawless urban badland of remote, ruined apartment blocks (filmed in Tbilisi), where there is a secret cult run by an allegedly charismatic man called Gregori, played by Vincent Cassel on dismayingly uncharismatic form. He finds desperate single mothers with newborns and persuades them to come as quasi-wives to his strange community, where he trains up the kids in an artful-dodger robbery scam, the spoils being converted into cash by a fence figure called Uncle Charlie (Frank Moylan).
Kleiman’s film is arguably interesting in that it sets out to show the relatively calm, day-to-day life of a cult. But Cassel never gives us the terrifying explosion of temper that the film always appears to be promising, or indeed anything in the way of hypnotic charm or leadership aura. He just looks bored – and boring.
