A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya) [Sub: Eng]

Leading man Neumann is a find in his screen debut, with the looks of 'Liberty Valance'-era Lee Van Cleef.

After two-and-a-half hours of punishing, brutal drama, you'll probably feel almost as battered as the poor heroine.

The sheer scope of the project demands recognition. It misses the moon by a galaxy, but at least it is has the nerve to take the shot.

A captivating, hallucinatory plunge into Russia's atrophied civil society, in which a woman's search for answers is rewarded with humiliation and abuse.

A Gentle Creature is not what one might call a fun watch. But it's also obviously not just horror for horror's sake.

A Gentle Creature truly is a grotesque, Kafka-esque nightmare vision, a nihilistic yowl of pain.

It's not an easy film to watch, packed with symbolism and references that will be lost on most Western viewers.

The film gives us a rich, clammy idea of Russia's horrors as we follow a woman (Vasilina Makovtseva) into a bureaucratic hell.

A Gentle Creature is too overblown with its anti-Russia stance, consistently missing the intended target of the country's suffocating bureaucracy in order to portray ordinary Russians as being as corrupt as those in charge.

This challenging film requires some patience but the reward is a portrait of Russia that feels like a howl of anguish.

[A Gentle Creature] is a wonderfully strange and thought-provoking cinematic experience.

Putting a Grimm slant on a Dostoevskian fable, Sergei Loznitsa exposes the Russian soul to pitiless scrutiny in this gruelling odyssey.