Critics reviews

Our extended considerations of organised religion, patriarchal society and how to be alone whistle through all the film's beautiful empty space, colouring and complicating it.

Sukhitashvili’s performance as Yana is all the more impressive for conveying the complexity of her crisis with limited movement or dialogue... Her enforced decorum is reflected in the film’s rigorous aesthetic, its sparse dialogue and recurring stillness. In contemplating the horror of a subservient life, Kulumbegashvili has created a quite extraordinarily compelling film.

[Kulumbegashvili] takes Yana’s inner battle between what is expected to believe and what she actually believes to shocking extremes. To its mild detriment, "Beginning" stays on a cerebral plane even at its most ravaging and emotionally intense. But in its muted havoc lies a potent intellectual laceration.

This is a slow-burning dark film, with, at times, some exasperatingly long takes, clearly influenced by a certain auteur cinema... But even with its overly-long takes, Beginning intrigues, revealing a daring new voice in cinema.

There is certainly room to argue that among [the film's] arthouse stylings, it doesn’t have much depth of thought about its themes of religion, family, sexual assault or systems of power. Nevertheless, as a purely aesthetic cinematic experience, "Beginning" will surely number among the best of the year.

Beginning is a psychological study. And I mean it when I say “study”, for the director trains an almost clinical eye on her protagonist.

This is a director... with impeccable taste in influences and a gift for making those influences manifest. She also has something more, a curiosity about her characters and their world that defines itself through contrasts and oppositions. There is cruelty here but also tenderness, and hellish images that are followed by glimpses of a terrestrial paradise. By

The unhurried style deployed by writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili in her debut feature lends [scenes] a sense of dread and of immutability. There is no end and no beginning, only unstoppable life.

There may be moments that are haunting or flat-out alarming, but it's possible to get pleasantly lost in the film's gentle rhythms... The director's compositions, way of holding us at a sometimes paralysing remove before bringing us painfully close, and brilliant use of off-screen space mark her out as someone to watch very closely, hopefully for years to come.

There is something inert and frankly shallow in the film: a refrigerated mannerism in which rape and religious beliefs are both kinds of arthouse artefact, not made any more authentic or compelling by the suggestions of Yana’s own ambiguous attitude to what has just happened. Kulumbegashvili’s style is confident, if derivative. Her technique now has to evolve away from these self-conscious influences.

The film is subtle, understated, and minimalist almost to a fault... The quietly expressive but carefully restrained performance by Georgian theatre and film actress Ia Sukhitashvili is a big part of what makes the approach successful.

The lengths of time the shots last and the camera angles that hide more context than they reveal are what formally is most striking about Beginning. But it is the story that sticks with you.