Was he supposed to be there?

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Films of 2021 

#35 : Śniegu już nigdy nie będzie (Never Gonna Snow Again)

A mysterious masseur visits a dysfunctional gated community in this absorbing fairytale from Polish film-maker Małgorzata Szumowska, resulting in a rich brew of strangeness in an unsettling vision of suburbia.

Unsurprisingly, I've never heard of this - and the description above doesn't exactly give me a lot to go on.

And, having watched it, I can tell you I'm almost as much in the dark about the film now as I was before I watched it.  Alec Utgoff plays Zhenia, the mysterious masseur and he does indeed visit a dysfunctional gated community and provides massages and more to the various members, but it's not entirely clear what the more is.  A stranger entering a closed community is hardly a new idea, but generally you have some idea as to why the stranger is there - it's very unclear here who (if anyone) is using who and for what. I'd love to tell you more about what's going on, but that would involve me having some clue as to what's going on - and I'm afraid I just don't.  If I had to guess, it would be something along the lines of learning to accept yourself for who you are - but seriously, it could be anything.

It's a well shot film, featuring an impressive array of locations and effects - including a particularly intriguing beginning.  There are also quite a lot of dogs in the film.  And some Segways.  And some impressive Christmas trees being cut down.  And a load of different languages spoken throughout the film.  And no, I've still no idea what any of it means.

It's a well acted film with more natural performances than I was expecting - Alec Utgoff is in pretty much all of the film so he has to take the plaudits but everyone plays their part, even if I'm not convinced that many of them will have had the faintest idea what they were contributing.

I'd have to sat that considering this is a film that I understood basically none of, I enjoyed it a lot more than you might expect - I just kinda went with the flow and accepted it was unlikely that it was all going to be tied up in a neat package at the end.  And it most definitely wasn't - if anything, the ending goes out of its way to confuse matters even further (and it snows - but don't worry, that's not a spoiler alert!)

At the time of writing, this film is available to rent on most of the usual channels - I can't say I'd exactly recommend it, but if you fancy having your mind somewhat blown whilst some nice looking visuals pass before your eyes, there are worse ways of spending a couple of hours.  But there are better ways as well.

#36 - A promising premise not quite fulfilled.
#34 - A film more enjoyable than its subject matter