Viy - La maschera del demonio

I've seen several recent fantasy and sci-fi Russian movies and they all feel like the story is a badly assembled jigsaw. Is it that the Russian story makes sense and somehow they can't translate to English? I think that's unlikely. Viy is a strange combination of Dracula and Sleepy Hollow, with a few English actors to make it mainstream, but the rest, including cinematography, is Russian. Jason Flemyng plays the main character, an English scientist having to deal with Slavic superstition in "uncivilized" Russia (yes, it's not Transilvania, which is in Romania, I would have hoped Russians at least knew that), with Charles Dance in a few irrelevant scenes.

The idea was interesting, the special effects nice, but it felt like something was terribly wrong with the assembly of the scenes and the dialogues. You probably have to watch in Russian (if a version even exists).

With a $28M budget this movie does a lot of cool things visually. The sets, costumes and special effects are all fun to see. The issue lies with the plot and characters which are a total mess.

To start it's difficult to even understand protagonists vs antagonists in this movie. Side characters seemingly do random things and reverse course a lot. It's confounded by a lot of the characters looking similar with giant mustaches and pony tails. Then a character shows up that we haven't even seen in the first half of the movie and suddenly she is playing a seminal role?

The plot supposedly centers around the demon Viy but there is confusion around potential multiple demons and how the demon(s) even operate and what their goals are.

The whole movie is really a big mess but it's not without entertainment. It reminds me of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (a bit) in terms of tone and fantasy characters, but if those movies were made by drunk Russians.

I liked the movie. When I was going to see it I had already known that it was not a screen version of Nikolai Gogol's story but "a movie based on it". That's why I was not disappointed as some people who went to the theatre to see just a new version of 1967 "Viy". Because it is not.

This new "Viy" took the same legend from the book (based on a Slavic folklore legend), the same characters, the same ___location - a small Ukrainian out-of-the-way village, added some new characters , CGI (quite good), shuffled everything, sprinkled it with humour (sometimes dark)and eminently suitable music. And as a result, we have an interesting mystic story definitely worth watching.

Poor Nikolai Gogol... The British empire came to "put order" in the East, eradicating the Ukrainian folk from his masterful long tale "Vij". This is an overlong, convoluted, revisionist version of Gogol's story, reducing the fantasy elements to dumb babble passing for "scientific" explanations of the beliefs and fears of an agrarian, superstitious community in Transylvania during the 18th century. Better watch the 1967 "Vij" or Mario Bava's masterful, free adaptation "La maschera del demonio" (1960).

Thoroughly enjoyable bit of weirdness. The movie looks great and there is some great comedic timing from a lot of the characters here too. The juxtaposition of peasant superstition and aristocratic "there's an explanation for everything" is a great mix. For most of the movie, what is supposed to be real or an illusion from the story's point of view is in question. This reminds me of parts of Pan's Labyrinth, Naked Lunch, Van Helsing, among others. It does have some flaws in the logic and the pacing at times, and it can be a little confusing separating the characters from their grime to make sense of the story. This is one of those movies that's got a lot of art house in it so it's not going to appeal to everyone, but if you like a unique mix of camp, fx, and writing that leaves some questions unanswered you'll enjoy it. I highly recommend this one. I would go see a sequel in a heartbeat.