Astrakhan, Russia based eclectic art-rock band, Vevil / Вевил, based on the core of Vitaly Borodin (guitars, piano, organ, live looping, vocals, bass, synth, violin) and Vlad Limarenko (bass, guitar, synth, and vocals) with the addition of Oksana Popova on vocals, are back with a short art-house film inspired by the surreal ideologies of Franz Kafka blending hypnotic, old-time silent movie elements with dramatic lighting, ominous shadows and alternate dimensional mind control about a “journalist’s life in the midst of repressions and changing vectors of state propaganda” to draw eerie parallels to our modern dystopian times.
Lo-fi sound spins wiry tactile guitar strings and sharp piercing notes with low, dull piano strikes and strange acoustic reverb expansions, to extract resonant hums into chilling glows of anticipation and fright culminating with screeching violin textures, quivering amid loud buzzing swarms of subconscious fluttering fear.
Spotlight focus shines stress and anxiety onto an unsuspecting worker, whose minimal office setting begins to transform into a nightmarish maze of distracting booby traps, set in motion by the visually audible second hand ticking backwards toward 1984. “The figures of Stalin’s birth are in reverse (8781-21 81)”, which symbolizes the beginning of the repression” embraced by the principal character to cause his demise at the hands of the state machine. Strange transition scenes cast in crumbling religious iconography, systematic oppression and uncertain mystical alliances give rise to a secret universe hidden inside the body of an eyeless masked murderer, whose eerie powers of self-preservation lie within the inheritance of latent idiosyncrasies transmitted from the USSR to modern Russia.
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