Reviews

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  ★★★½ review by Omar! on Letterboxd

  It's my birthday today and already 3 different people have told me that I should do or accomplish something in my life. 
  
  So I watched this film. 
  
  I mean I accomplished something didn't I?!

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  ★★★½ review by Luis_989 on Letterboxd

  Exaggerated? Yes, but it opens an interesting debate and that debate doesn't have to do with religion, but with what it does according to the interpretations that each person comes to have about it and how they manipulate it according to their own mental state.

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  ★★★★½ review by raft_dkh on Letterboxd

  Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s film The Student is a bitterly dark movie, one which shows the slow corruption of a society, primarily in this case through religion, but also through any number of prejudices and causes. The film is a deeply visceral look at hate, zealotry, and human callousness, told through the story of a Russian high school student who begins to quote from the Bible and espouse a vitriolic form of Christianity. The Student is exhausting, and to a certain extent feels almost unnecessarily brutal, but one senses a political urgency in this film as well, an urgency which positions the authority (the principal’s office is adorned with symbols of the Russian state, including a Stalin-esque photograph of Vladimir Putin hanging above the door) as complicit in fanning the flames of hate for its own ends. The film’s unfolds often in a series of breathlessly long takes, with its handheld camera bringing us close to the volatile characters. In an inspired move, the film also inserts citations every time a character quotes from the Bible, a tasteful, austere bit of text fading in every now and then which heightens the brutal irony of the scenes, particularly when the main character expresses his radical Old-Testament hatefulness.

  I don’t know how to reckon with films such as this. On one hand, it is incredibly engaging, and it is hard to deny the exquisite mastery of craft in its flowing long shots, dystopic cinematography, or committed performances. On the other, it is deeply uncomfortable to watch, and not necessarily nuanced in its handling of these themes. But then again, perhaps that is what is needed nowadays. I give this film a high rating, but with the caveat that I don’t know if I could handle it again.

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  ★★★★½ review by Paul Hernandez on Letterboxd

  Avasalladora, con mucho muy buen diálogo y confrontación de creencias. Pude imaginar que ésto venía de una obra de teatro, sin embargo me gustó mucho la forma que tiene la cámara de moverse, ¡esas escenas largas sin corte!. Hay bastante muestra de las diferentes facetas que una persona puede tomar ante determinadas situaciones, sobre todo hacia el final. Rotunda.

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  ★★★★½ review by Dace Čaure on Letterboxd

  This film raises a lot of questions. But these are not addressed to self, no, I would like to ask them to the director. In the discussion after the screening Serebrennikov got into a heated debate with himself about the meaning of belief and religion in one's life, but the film got sorta forgotten, so I did not get my answers.

  All I know is I loved the film. There were quite a few problems with it, yes, the main one being the characters who seemed not like people, but more like typical expressions of the included ideas. But in this case I am not angry about it, because it was exactly what this - a film about ideas - needed. I don't believe it's something the director has overlooked, especially knowing that he pays attention to every single detail in his frame. The ending might seem a bit anti-climatic, as suddenly I felt I was watching a completely different story (and told in a less attentive way), but there comes my questions to the filmmaker, answers to which I probably need to find on my own.

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