In the movie called "The Monk and the Demon," the demon himself does not appear for an hour. And up to this mark, you watch one movie (something funny about monks, but a bit far from comedy), and then another (the story about the correction of a demon by a holy man). The two parts are so different in mood and content that it is unclear how they even ended up in the same movie. I put an average assessment simply because the film is not made on a tyap-gap, as is customary in cinema in Russia, but made qualitatively, on good equipment, where it is necessary with small special effects, music is exclusively for business. And most importantly, the actors play well. That’s exactly what the film is based on – you follow the faces, dialogues, gestures, believe in laughter, tears, anger.
But at the same time, all this quality work, great acting, is built around a bad script and almost no content. The trailer for the movie promised what? Comedy. Based on it, I expected that there would be a lot of humor about monastic life, that a monk and a demon would merrily interact, fighting for some values against the background of a bunch of people, differently associated with them. It turned out that all the jokes were already shown in the trailer. Yes, I don’t mind that the film would push serious topics, but it also needs to be done consistently, with the development of events on several characters, and the inconsistency of a bad script, the untwistedness of the action is the main problem of this film. Except for the two main characters, all the characters are episodic and give almost nothing to the plot.
Whole blocks of the film can be easily cut out of it, for example, the whole story about the visit of the Emperor.
Some statements look very strange, for example, the saint at confession says that there is no sin that he would not try. The barber says that Jerasulim is full of devils - why should Legiosha say that evil forces are bad there?
In addition, in some places the film is very similar to “Island” (2006), and without copying here clearly did not do.
And even with all this, I would give the film 6 points, but alas, in his short appearance, the actor-one-role Madianov AGAIN played a seething inner malice Kolobkov, and besides, it has bare ass, inappropriate in a film with such content. It’s a pity that there could have been a good movie, you can see that the actors and the crew worked with the soul, but a bad script with a lot of contradictions and inappropriate scenes ruined everything.