Critics reviews

Under Electric Clouds is the film Blade Runner 2049 was attempting to be, give or take a couple of fist fights and explosions. This was the glacially paced dystopian rumination I'd wanted all along, it just took a film with its ambition without its humanity for me to realize it. Blade Runner is very clearly a study of who is and isn't human. Aleksei German, Jr.'s Under Electric Clouds wonders what humanity means, and what it looks like, when progress has stranded us in a desert of our own ambition.

Imagine a windy Sokurov talk-marathon Russo-adapted from J.G. Ballard or Don DeLillo: German is exploring, not declaring, and his landscape of terminal beaches and abandoned skyscraper-skeletons expresses his ambivalence with a searing eloquence.

Like [filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos], German trains his camera on a carefully contrived tableau, sets each of the figures within it in motion, across, forward, back, in and out of the frame, and has the camera glide to recompose within the shot, recompose again, and then again and so on. Big themes, blatant symbolism, characters as stand-ins for ideas, classes or forces—there's an overlap in the sensibilities of Angelopoulos and German rooted 20th century modernism, its theater and poetry.

This episodic Russian art film was written and directed by Aleksey German Jr. and shows the marked influence of his father's work (My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Hard to Be a God) in its intricate tracking shots, immersive sound design, and opaque storytelling, dense with allusions to Russian art and history.

Arguably the only great film among the prizewinners, Under Electric Clouds is a work of epic ambition that delivers... Of course Under Electric Clouds is a meditation on today's Russia... But at its core, it's the story of the director himself, who, after the death of his overbearing father, a revered pantheon filmmaker, finally has the chance to find his own path.

The futurist believes that history is something crafted through human effort, but in Aleksei German Jr.'s film, through their failed architectural endeavor at grandeur and permanence, the architects and heirs have understood that humanity does not so much create history, as submit to it.

In each of seven chapters of the film, the images are majestically composed in such a way that each of them could be a stand-alone picture or a moment in a choreography (which sits well with one of the most distinguished nations for ballet, if we can even speak of a nation...). These are pictures advocated by the director, very non-discursive and highly symbolic.

The film is at once expansive and claustrophobic. Sergey Mikhalchuck and Evgeniy Privin's cinematography, conveying a half-abandoned world of mist and infrastructural failure, compensates for scenes that German only intermittently feels the need to direct. Indeed, the visual beauty is often at odds with the content – perhaps deliberately so – so considered are the visual textures in contrast to what is sometimes a directorial laziness.

A wildly ambitious, undeniably overreaching, often quite brilliant head trip from Russian director Alexey German Jr. This is a capital-A art movie of the first order, like some gene-spliced hybrid of "Last Year at Marienbad" and "The City of Lost Children," divided into seven loosely interconnected chapters and set alternately in the near future and the recent past.