Siberia Parent Guide

Clint (Willem Defoe) is on the run from his past. He’s fled all the way to Siberia, where he now runs a bar despite not speaking any of the local languages. But he’s haunted by what he’s left behind, and takes a dog-sled trip out to a remote cave where he finds elements of his past very much alive – now he just needs to make sense of the jumbled hallucinations he experiences.

I’d love to tell you more, but there are two reasons why I can’t. First, this movie is almost entirely incomprehensible. I’ve seen short films at art galleries that made more sense, and that’s not a joke. This has a lot of very deliberate and provocative imagery, but it is completely without context, largely without dialogue, and edited with (I assume) a kitchen blender. Secondly, I quit about 45 minutes in – something I’ve never done before in this job. Usually, when the going gets weird, the weird start writing the review and move on. To quote Hunter S. Thompson: “Buy the ticket, take the ride”. It just didn’t seem worth the bother. Roughly every ten minutes there’s some graphic nudity or violence which usually come out of nowhere, and without the benefit of a cogent story to make sense of them, there isn’t much reason to sit through it. As much as I like Willem Defoe, this definitely ranks as one of his stranger projects. And that’s coming from someone who actually enjoyed The Lighthouse, despite its abundant dark themes and negative content.

I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s possible the second half of the movie suddenly switches gears into a reasonable viewing experience – but I’m not betting on it. Maybe you’re the king of the film snobs and you love this inaccessible, disturbing, grotesque weirdness. Maybe you’re a fan of directors like Lars von Trier or David Lynch and none of this is new to you. But my bet is that if you’re one of those people, you aren’t reading the reviews on this website anyway. Maybe this is just too edgy for me – but to drag Hunter Thompson into this again, “The only people who really know where the edge is are the ones who have gone over”. With Siberia, enter at your own risk. Here there be dragons. Naked ones.