Darkness Visible: Khrzhanovsky Reformulates Saga of Shattered Scientists
If ex-Attorney General and fascist sentinel Pam Bondi was ever credited as uttering anything worth repeating, it was her childish ‘emperor’s new clothes’ technique testifying before congress in her doltish redirect from exposing pedophiles to trumpeting the virility of the US economy. “That’s what we should be talking about!,” she hysterically screamed, like a Puritan witness during the Salem Witch Trials. Pam was entirely correct, as we should all be talking about the Dau project, one of the most singularly fascinating accomplishments in the history of cinema, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky. From one era of tyrants to another, it seems there’s a terrifying timelessness, underlined by the significant controversy also accompanying the various mutations of an experimental film project which was principally completed over fifteen years ago. Shot from 2008 to 2011 on a sprawling set with immersive techniques which creating a true-life version of something like The Truman Show (1998) or Synecdoche, New York (2008), the impetus was a biopic of Nobel Prize winning physicist Lev Landau, lassoed into the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. But it evolved into something so much more. While Khrzhanovsky premiered disparate cinematic chapters at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, including Dau.Natasha (read review) and Dau.Degeneration (met with significant outcry regarding unscripted sequences of psychological and sexual abuse), a series of other Dau film chapters were available to rent online for a period of time during the COVID-19 pandemic, its producers asserting the project, created amongst a community in isolation, was appropriate for consumption in eerily similar circumstances. In 2024, Khrzhanovsky shot new footage and finally was able to stitch together a version of the material which resembles a biopic throughline for its titular figure, charting forty years of his life from 1928 Leningrad to 1968 Moscow.
Lev Landau (Teodor Currentzis), a Greek-born physicist, lives in the bustling chaos of Leningrad, a major stage for the newly minted Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan. While his comrades consider him the genius of their generation in his field, it wouldn’t appear he gets to appreciate the fruits of his labor. Taking a position teaching theoretical physics at Kharkiv State University, he eventually escapes the torment of the KGB, who demand the university’s scientists assist in the development of weapons to defend the homeland. Fleeing to Moscow, where his connections lead him to a position at a secret scientific institute, perhaps he can at last display his talents. But terror follows like a shadow.
Considering its time and subject, Dau should be troubling in its depiction of tortured and terror stricken physicists battered into submission in serving the Soviet nuclear program. Khrzhanovsky does stray away from delving so depressingly into the formidable sequences of torture defining his chapter on canteen employee Natasha, but Azhippo (played by actual ex-KGB official, Vladimir Azhippo), the brutal head KGB official, gets plenty of screen time. Dau’s stint in prison for rebelling against the nuclear program is heralded by the film’s most uncomfortable sequence, including extreme debasement when he’s forced to drink a KGB officer’s urine. Khrzhanovsky doesn’t shy away from the violence underlining his marriage to wife, Nora (Radmila Shegoleva), both who seem to vent frustration over their captivity by unleashing aggression on one another (but Khrzhanovsky adds extra levels of depravity in the 1968 epilogue, where the isolated Nora has turned to their own son for the creature comforts of sexual intimacy).
Finally front and center in this agonized product, actor Teodor Currentzis’ performance also takes shape, to some degree, as the feted physicist. Overwhelming montages in the opening Leningrad sequences convey a primordial urban wasteland, a society struggling to calm the disorder following the revolution. The hellish climes of Kharkiv, where Dau attempts to teach from 1933 to 1938, and where he meets Nora, provide the next segment. With Kharkiv undergoing a full fledged famine, the scientists get what could be called special treatment and limited access to resources unavailable to the general public. Khrzhanovsky glides over the wasteland of elderly women picking through the mountainous heaps of rotting cabbage, the squeaking vegetable providing its own plaintive melody (and recalls the bread chewing, doll-making babushkas of his controversial debut, 4 back in 2005).
A masquerade ball, accompanied by a disorienting cacophony, resembles something like The Wicker Man (1973)’s sacrificial prologue melded with the wedding sequence in Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), establishing what would arguably come to be Dau’s most significant relationship. But Kharkiv is a hellscape (including a gruesome moment where the scientists receive fresh goat heads to boil as a delicacy). It’s interesting to note how this was the world the Russian emissaries in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) were trying to escape, the po-faced Greta Garbo dispatched to yank them back to their starving Mother Land.
Obviously, everything takes a darker turn when Dau escapes to Moscow to wiggle his way into the secret scientific institute, assisted by his mentor, Anatoly Krupitska (a rather Rasputin-like Anatoly Vasiliev). After two of his comrades were imprisoned for refusing to develop radar demanded by the military, Dau’s idyll is brief. Eventually, Dau’s imprisonment within the walls of the institute are complete, and Khrzhanovsky chooses to focus on the only escapism which seems available, debauched sexual relations (including with a visiting ex-lover, a Greek actress named Maria, played by Maria Nafpliotou, who received her own segment, the 1956 set Dau.Three Days, 2020).
With three distinct cinematographers (Jürgen Jürges, Manuel Alberto Claro, Lol Crawley), three production designers (Denis Shibanov, Olga Gurevich, Boris Shapovalov) and two editors (Ilya Permyakov, Rob Myers), this latest mutation of Dau, arguably the most definitive version, is a formidable, cohesive crystallization of a pure cinematic audacity. The fascinating behind-the-scenes glows like a demon behind its eyes, revealing strange, sumptuous visuals in the sprawling, industrial muck of a putrid saga. It’s wearying to behold, troubling to gaze upon, and supremely satisfying as an artifact of an experimental artistic endeavor which could never be repeated.
Reviewed on September 9th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 195 Minutes.
★★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
