Review of “Day Watch”
Woah! What a ride is this film – a Russian fantasy action thriller of epic dimensions and outrageous style, guaranteed to stun you with its impossibly imaginative special effects one moment and confound you with its bricolage banality the next. It’s an extraordinarily playful and inventive work – even the subtitles perform wonderful animated tricks.
It’s the sequel to the highly successful Nightwatch, and takes off where that story concluded – and with the same cast, director and style. The story is complicated and involves the supernatural forces of Dark and Light who live in a strange reality superimposed on contemporary human existence. An uneasy pact exists between the two sides, guaranteeing equilibrium and a harmony of sorts. Yet Zavulon, the leader of the Dark Others is looking for an excuse to fight, because he has a young boy - Yegor - who is shaping up to be a Great Other, with the power to beat all comers. Yegor’s father Anton – the central hero of the first film – is a Night Watch operative trying to keep a lid on the excesses of the Dark Others who attack normal people and drink their blood like vampires. With Anton on his deadly rounds is a new trainee Svetlana, a healer and seer. Anton is also searching for the chalk of fate, which he can use to re-write history, and return his son to his side. The story is driven by the impending coming of age of Yegor, an event that will bring on the apocalypse, unless Anton can find the chalk and shift time.
The film belongs to director Timur Bekmambetov and his cinematographer . Their flair - particularly in transitioning between scenes - is worth the viewing alone, and the world they create for their strange collection of characters is eerie, bureaucratic and bizarre. The cast is uniformly strong and the story never flags into a simple good versus evil morality tale – its far too richly populated and frequently infused with self-referential humour. Overall it’s like a Terry Gilliam film with vodka and ice.
Rating:
Leave a Reply