Recensioni de* critic*

A Russian friend once defined the Russian temperament with one word: "heavy." That certainly holds for the characters in "Elena," an excellent tale of a Russian family struggling to navigate a world defined by Western capitalism and the supposed magical powers afforded by digital technology.

His new film is strikingly different, a sharp, bitterly comic story of crystalline clarity about the moral and spiritual corruption of present-day Russia... It's a gripping, resonant tale, and Nadezhda Markina is outstanding as Elena, and far more sympathetic than perhaps she should be..

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s multi-awarded film, which follows the superb The Return and the less impressive but still highly watchable The Banishment, paints an eloquent picture of Russian life predicated on getting by without basic honesty.

The subtlety and stealth of this movie is a marvel, and so is the complex and enigmatic performance of Markina... It is superbly shot and directed; it does not offer a thriller-type ending – the narrative is resolved in a disquieting minor key. A deeply satisfying film.

There is a beautifully realised subtlety in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s understated but gripping drama about family ties, about the way that sometimes tensions vie with tenderness in even the closest relationships... [Zvyagintsev] plots a steady course through a moral quagmire with unhurried assurance, assisted particularly by Nadezhda Markina’s captivating performance in the title role and Andrey Smirnov’s admirably irritable Vladimir...

Trafficking in Manichean imagery—a church contrasted with nuclear silos, a pious woman with a fiend ringed by fire—in order to question whether moral purity exists, Elena is stretched thin by its own contradictions and outsized ambitions.

Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers’ attitude—which is somehow simultaneously empathetic yet critical to the point of occasional resentment—toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.

“Elena” is, on the surface, most akin to a thriller, but it’s also partly a family melodrama that examines class divides in Russia. That the film explores this idea organically through its characters and story, never once taking us out of the story for some head-slapping, obvious proclamation, is yet another feather in Zvyagintsev’s cap.

Elena shows Zvyagintsev wisely concentrating on plot, character and social/political context rather than portentous atmospherics. The cumulative impact is stunning.