Zoology (Zoologiya) [Sub: Eng]

If 'Teeth' and 'Raw' got your tail wagging, you'll lap this up.

While I would only recommend it to art-house enthusiasts due to its slow pace, it is refreshing to see a film that deals with body image from an older woman's point of view.

[A] combination of fairy-tale wonderment and stark realism propels this enthralling film, which showcases serious acting talent in its lead spot with relative newcomer Natalya Pavlenkova.

Marbled with melancholy, this is an intelligent meditation on gender, age and body image.

[Pavlenkova's] acting is Zoology's sole redeeming point, which makes it all the more distasteful that all the plot developments, and the tentative love story in particular, are put in the service of the final twist.

Tverdovsky doesn't take the story anywhere really startling. His compassionate, intriguing film is enjoyable but anticlimactic.

You probably need to be Russian to be able to fully unpack the layers of satire and allegory in this defiantly oddball tale of personal growth. But the impact of the sheer weirdness of a story of a middle-aged zoo worker who grows a tail is universal.

There are strains of Gogol and Kafka in this intriguing if flawed movie from Russian director Ivan I Tverdovskiy, shot in a restless handheld style, the camera roaming and panning across a dreary workaday world.

Zoology is a genuine oddity: bizarre, surprising and affecting. If it's meaning is muddled, Natasha Pavlenkova' s central turn makes the tale - and the tail - worthwhile.

Any redemption in Zoology comes from the sheer accomplishment of Natalya Pavlenkova's playing. To explore such depths of pain is, perverse though it may seem, somehow to transcend them.

Manages to tell the story of a woman growing a tail with sad and memorable conviction.

[An] intriguing Russian satire.