The Hollywood of the modern era is well and truly obsessed with designing films by committee and targeting the lowest common denominator to cast as wide a net as possible over the wallets of the average consumers. While works with more integrity and vision sometimes slip through the cracks (the recently excellent Mad Max: Fury Road comes to mind), it is far more usual to end up with incoherent messes like Hot Pursuit. As Hollywood begins to crush itself under the weight of its hundreds of sequels, reboots and throwbacks, the movie industries in countries like India (Bollywood) and Russia (Rollywood?) have been steadily picking up the pace by increasingly often producing more risky and unique films than Hollywood has dared to in decades. Forbidden Empire (or Viy as it is called everywhere else including the film’s own title screen) was made by a largely Russian cast and crew and loosely based around a Ukrainian short story of the same name, so even though it features a couple of familiar faces like Jason Flemyng and Charles Dance, from the moment it starts you can tell it is not of the same ilk as your average Hollywood flick.
Oleg Stepchenko has been working on getting this film made since 2005, but his knack for storytelling still permeates the finished product. The story follows a British cartographer in the early 1800s as he journeys through and becomes stranded in Ukraine’s Carpathian mountains in a village with a purportedly accursed church. Having seen my share of Ukrainian films and personally been through the Carpathian mountains I can verify that the Ukrainian spirit of the original story is well represented in Viy in spite of both greater Russia’s abysmal track record with Ukrainian things and the fact that only select story elements were appropriated. Along with the story, the movie’s visuals were also quite impressive.
It’s hard for the burgeoning international film industries to emulate the quality of visual effects found in Hollywood films, but the effects in Viy (on average) are impressive. While some of the green screened sequences throughout look even campier than your average class film project, many of the effects (particularly with the creatures that appear at various times) are easily as good as any of today’s huge budget productions. The fact that Stepchenko was able to make a visually focused dark fantasy movie on a similar budget to what you’d see in Hollywood for a lower grade summer comedy film is frankly astounding. So even though you’re not likely to forget that the movie you’re watching was not made by Americans, the visuals are solid enough to help you suspend your disbelief and become more invested in the movie’s world even in the modern post-Avatar era.
Overall, Viy is a surprisingly solid film and for entertainment quality alone stands toe-to-toe with this summer’s blockbuster hits. Even after years in production it’s still a little rough around the edges presentation (and even acting-) wise, but its minor faults are happily outweighed by its interesting story and compelling visuals. If your Netflix queue just isn’t doing it for you some night this summer, you could do a whole lot worse than checking out this charming Russian film and getting a well-presented taste of eastern European folklore.