At the Asian World Film Festival Los Angeles this week was included a new film from Kazakhstan by Adilkhan Yerzhanov – Cadet. Adilkhan Yerzhanov is a prominent filmmaker from Kazakhstan and also very prolific. Cadet is his third film made this past year and it screened at the Berlinale last year.
He made two other films last year: Steppenwolf set in the badlands of Kazakhstan, where the rule of law is minimal and criminal gangs battle one another for control of goods and territory. And Moor, the nickname for an ex-military man named Beibars, who returns from prison to look after his brother’s family, but finds that his brother has disappeared, leaving huge debts behind.
In the movie universe of director Yerzhanov, Cadet should serve as a companion piece to both films, maybe even a weird prequel to “Moor.” Yerzhanov has a stable of favorite actors who tend to show up in many of his films. Yerzhanov, known for his unique combination of genre approach and “guerilla” production conditions usually sticks to the mixture of drama, dark comedy, action, thriller and neo-western, but now with Cadet, he has plunged straight to horror.
What is new about Yerzhanov’s Cadet is his comments on Kazakhstan society and its co-dependency with Russia, both in a Soviet and post-Soviet context, more directly than before. The main character in Cadet is Serik (Serik Sharipov), a teenager brought by his mother Alina (Anna Starchenko) to an elite military school in a semi-fictional town of Karatas – which is often the main stage of Yerzhanov’s cinematic stories. There Alina has landed a job of a history teacher and she do see her teaching a history lesson about Russian history.
Young Serik does not seem much of a soldier-type, with his longish mop of hair and his dreamy-loner attitude. Obviously, he is not going to fit into a military school. Immediately he has trouble fitting in with the rest of the students who seem way more hardened.
The stern school principal, only referred to as colonel (Aleksey Shemes) is of the same opinion, but he does not know that the two are related to someone further up in the hierarchy: Serik is an illegitimate son of the dreaded Bolat Asanovich. However, it seems that Serik’s future comrades “didn’t get the memo” about going easy on him regarding hazing, so he gets bullied regularly.
The school also has a history of suicides within the ranks, which is something that the colonel and his subordinates do not try to conceal, as it is a prestigious military academy and not everyone can take the pressure. When the next one occurs, Alina gets frightened that Serik might be the victim
When the military police inspector Birzhan Rakhymzhanov (Ratmir Yusupzharov) comes to interrogate him along with other cadets and personnel, the boy does not act like his usual self. There follow a series of odd incidents which suggest that Serik has some kind of demonic power. Does this boy “make” his peers, teachers and training officers behave so strangely. Does he make some boys there commit suicide? Is it all connected to a curse coming from Nergal cults which strikes every 14 years, resulting in one school cadet killing his peers? Nergal was the ancient god of war, plagues, and death and the strange drawings that appear in places and on the back of young Serik seem related to ritual curses.
What happens with these Nergal cults is that they strike every 14 years, resulting in deaths and suicides. The military school seem haunted by these recurring episodes and the current one in 2022 is somehow connected to Serik.
Yerzhanov is known for his knack of picking the right non-professionals and working with them to perfection. As one of his previous discoveries, Starchenko fills the role of a strong-willed single mother perfectly and with confidence. Sharipov gets to play the type of a creepy movie kid in a “violence begets violence”-type of a story, but Yusupzharov fares a bit better playing with the detective-type. The only experienced actor, Shemes, chews the scenery as the school principal and the dialogue as a proper baddie, which is quite fun to watch.
Elevated horror might not be Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s thing yet, but he works the genre effectively in the first half of the film. With Yerzhanov’s provocations by the means of finely faked “archival” photos and Soviet-era military propaganda posters always finding their way into the background of the shot, it becomes a better experience in the way the filmmaker clearly, but tastefully comments on the historical and current affairs between Kazakhstan and Russia, meaning former country’s voluntary servitude to the latter.
The years when the “demons” wake up are not chosen randomly either. They are all related to a Soviet or Russian dirty war or military engagement abroad. Obviously 2022 is the attack on the Ukraine. The killings start from 1938 in Finland, all the way to 2022 in Ukraine. Seeing it in another post-Soviet country, Estonia, that shares land border with Russia and is preparing for a potential invasion is quite an experience that makes people think about whether the “demons” are just a convenient trick or if they might be real.
Yerzhanov opens the film strongly, using his trademark dark humour and creating the mood by the means of eerie, droning music composed by Sandro Di Stefano. Cadet was lensed by the filmmaker’s regular collaborator Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev. The suspense is strong until the half-time mark when the story falls into the rails of genre clichés with some local with the policeman staging a fake séance to try to determine if Serik is just faking it. The closing scenes in the school basement almost seem like parody. All in all, Yerzhanov is a filmmaker to watch because of his ability to capture the latent violence of Kazakh society.
