Night Watch (2006)

A friend of mine who ran a revival theater described the nearly religious hush that would settle over an audience of Russian expatriates as they watched the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. His obscure mystical epics spoke their language in every way, and I couldn't help but wonder if a similar dynamic has powered Night Watch, a smashed mirror of a vampire film that set box office records in its native Russia. The movie I saw is a fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing. The director, Timur Bekmambetov, knows how to speed a subway car in your face or impale a man's hand with a pair of scissors, yet there's no light or order to his morbid tricks. Then, too, maybe it's that frenzied hopelessness that audiences in Russia responded to.

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