There are a few ways to get me excited about a movie. Sometimes I love the genre, other times it’s the filmmakers involved, and still other times it’s the source material. But when I first heard about Steppenwolf, something else caught my eye. The Fantasia plot synopsis described this film as “a Kazakh Mad Max,” and that was all I needed to know. I’m a big fan of the Mad Max franchise, and coming just a few months after the fantastic spin-off Furiosa, I couldn’t wait to check this movie out.
Steppenwolf was written and directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov, and it stars Anna Starchenko and Berik Aitzhanov. It takes place in an obviously George Miller-inspired post-apocalyptic landscape, and it follows a woman named Tamara as she tries to rescue her kidnapped son, Timka. She doesn’t know where the kid has gone, so she hires a brutal mercenary named Brajyuk to help her out, and when the two set off together to find the boy, ruthless violence follows them everywhere they go.
With a plot like that, it’s no surprise that Steppenwolf has garnered comparisons to the Mad Max movies, and thankfully, the execution totally lives up to the awesome premise. For starters, writer/director Adilkhan Yerzhanov does an excellent job of establishing this world as hellish, bleak, and almost completely devoid of good.
The movie begins in a police station, and right away, you can see that law and order are things of the past. The cops seem more like brutal warlords than public servants, and Brajyuk, who works for them as an enforcer, is utterly heartless. Soon afterwards, a firefight breaks out between the police and a rival faction, and the conflict hammers home once again just how dangerously fragile life has become in this world.
That harsh and unforgiving tone doesn’t let up until the credits begin to roll, but somewhat surprisingly, Steppenwolf isn’t a depressing film. It’s super fun, and that’s due entirely to the two lead characters. Let’s start with Brajyuk. This guy shows absolutely no concern for human life, including his own at times, and when he comes face to face with his enemies, he shows no qualms about doling out barbarically excessive amounts of punishment.
That being said, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Steppenwolf is a violent movie, but it’s not particularly gory. Much like Alex Garland’s Civil War, what makes Brajyuk’s actions so affecting isn’t just what he does but also how he does it. The man goes about his savage business as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, and that blatant disregard for human dignity is almost sickening.
But on top of that cold-hearted brutality, Brajyuk also has a more lighthearted side. He’ll sometimes laugh or break out into a little dance for no apparent reason, and the mismatch between the two halves of his personality is quite stark. Whenever he meets someone new, you can never be entirely sure if he’s going to shoot them or crack a joke, and in a paradoxical way, that psychotic, Joker-esque unpredictability both adds to the bleakness and keeps it from being too oppressive.
On the complete other end of the character spectrum, we have Tamara. She can barely get a word out without stuttering and murmuring like Milton from Office Space, but her problem isn’t just a sheepish personality. She’s utterly traumatized, and while it’s not entirely clear what caused her trauma, it probably has to do with the loss of her son and the violence all around her.
What’s more, her condition has reverted her to a nearly childlike state, and that manifests in a number of ways. Most notably, she often finds Brajyuk’s bizarre antics totally hilarious, and she has almost zero self-preservation instincts. To be fair, Tamara does manage to overcome these difficulties a couple of times, but by and large, they plague her throughout the entire movie.
As you can probably tell, both of these characters require talented performers to bring them to life, and thankfully, the two leads are totally up to the challenge. Every word they speak and every move they make is totally convincing, so they’re just an absolute joy to watch. In fact, everybody in Steppenwolf is great (but nobody else stays alive long enough to warrant any special mention!), and those excellent performances make the film’s bleakness way more palatable than it otherwise would be.
Last but not least, we have to talk a bit about the message of Steppenwolf. In the midst of all this doom and gloom, there are a couple of scenes where the characters talk about the existence of good in the world, and they give the film a bit of a moral compass. These moments are a plea for viewers to be good people despite all the bad we see in the real world, so for my money, the point of the movie is to show us the true face of evil. It demonstrates just how horrific and unappealing evil is, and by seeing that, it compels us to choose good in our lives instead.
That message is the cherry on top of this amazing experience, so as of this writing, Steppenwolf is the best movie I’ve seen at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To be fair, I still have a few more screeners to watch, but at the very least, it’s almost certainly going to end up near the top of my list when all is said and done. So keep an eye out for this film. It was recently acquired by Arrow, and when they release it to the public, I highly recommend that you give it a watch.
Steppenwolf was shown at Fantasia on July 27, and it’ll play again on August 2.