This is the second death. The new horror film by independent Omsk film director Denis Pavlenko is essentially a remake of the American horror film of 1962. But nevertheless, between the old version and the new one from our film director seemed to lie a huge gulf. Despite the coincidence of some accents, as well as semantic points in both films, Pavlenko still makes a fundamentally different film, and, in my opinion, about a completely different one. If you judge the film by the visual series initially, then of course there is something to find fault with; the viewer, spoiled by Hollywood cinema with a sweep, the dead with faces painted with white paint, of course, do not look. But oddly enough, apparently thanks to the talent of the director, who has long been working in conditions of modest budgets, this movie does not seem at all like some naked thrashack.
I can't hide it, I'm sorry. Yes, perhaps we could do better than just paint the faces of twenty extras, and for some reason recalls a similar attack of the dead from the thrash horror "The Mystery of the Old Cemetery." But I will not compare, in “The Mystery of the Old Cemetery” there is no acting as such, and in “Feria” the director’s contribution is still read. And mise-en-scene, and work with actors, and thought-form, a lot. So I can forgive Denis a lot, he is a rare smart girl. I read his last film in full as a horror parable about the death of talent. Almost the same thing Gogol wrote about two hundred years ago in his brilliant “Portrait”. By the way, this accent “You don’t let music through your soul, although you play” is striking, in the American film did not play a particularly important role.
The girl, the heroine of this film, is a typical child of our time. She is educated and intelligent, financially secure, but having a rare profession as an organist, she does not want to miss anything through her heart. Music is just a way of making money, nothing more. By the way, the authors correctly did that they removed the religious motif; in the American film, the heroine played in the temple, this would be inappropriate here. Yes, the heroine plays in an ordinary concert hall, her soul is separated from God and from religiosity by a huge chasm. And here, as the director tells us, lies the very trap, the very hidden secret meaning that makes the film a modest event. The dead here are rather read as a metaphor for the fact that when the true spiritual content leaves the artist’s gut, the obsolete, long dead, comes to this place. And the past, animated by a horde of creepy ghosts, fills the gap in what they should not be.
And the finale, with an interesting twist from the director, is natural. After all, it is not known which death is more terrible, spiritual or truly material. In provincial independent cinema, I think there is a treasure chest that we have yet to open. Let the visual component it will not soon catch up with the big movie, the spiritual filling, as it seems to me, it has already far surpassed it.