Malmkrog review – a deliberately uncompromising philosophical treatise

Malmkrog begins with a shot of a single, black-hooded figure trudging through knee-deep snow, the trees either side dark and looming. It’s an arresting image, brilliantly capturing the ethereal, alien freshness of the sub-zero air in the aftermath of heavy snowfall. It also makes for a stark opening juxtaposition for a film that is otherwise deliberately stuffy and controlled for nearly every second of its three-hour-and twenty-minute runtime.

Your mileage for Malmkrog may vary depending on your constitution. It is, for one thing, an adaptation of the work of 19th century Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov – not a novel, but a meditation inspired by his essays and philosophical thinking (this isn’t even Cristi Puiu’s first time adapting Solovyov, the first being Three Interpretations Exercise back in 2013).

Plot-wise, the film consists of little more than five Russian aristocrats, gathered in a large country manor house in late 19th century Transylvania, talking about Christianity, civilisation, theology, faith, and philosophy – though almost exclusively in French, as was the habit of Russian aristocracy of the time, who saw Francophilia as evidence of cultured excellence.

Cristi Puiu, one of the leading lights of the Romanian New Wave, can at times be a furiously exasperating filmmaker to deal with. At his best, such as with his 2005 feature The Death of Mr Lazarescu, he’s a searing filmmaker, balancing deadpan black comedy with pointed social criticism. On a bad day, as with 2010's Aurora (another excessive effort that runs upwards of three hours), he’s an excruciatingly boring filmmaker, self-serious and painfully static.

There is the thinnest, tiniest slither of absurdist comedy running through Malmkrog that prevents the film from become suffocating, though –  an element of self-awareness that these five characters and their conversations are essentially ridiculous, the mark of out-of-touch elites with no real understanding of the world around them (indeed, a mid-section surprise arguably confirms as much). Their conversations ultimately go nowhere and achieve nothing, except perhaps as devices of intellectual self-satisfaction.

Puiu is keenly aware of this, yet he ploughs onwards anyway, his focus always on the heady, complex dialogue. Given the restrictions placed upon them, the actors do an excellent job delivering extended monologues and pontifications across the film’s many extended takes – to the point that, on the extremely rare occasion that Puiu opts for a close-up, they appear to be suddenly struggling under the microscope. That the actors are able to give their characters something akin to interior lives beyond the essayistic script is also impressive – the naivety of Olga (Marina Palii) butting against the smugness of Nikolai (Frédéric Schulz-Richard), the austerity of Ingrida (Diana Sakalauskaité) at odds with the non-committal arrogance of Eduoard (Ugo Broussot).

Malmkrog belongs to an austere tradition of philosophically challenging films that are unafraid to be unabashedly intellectual – a lineage which includes heavyweight auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. For all the garlands lavished on those filmmakers, though, they are rarely quite as “talky” as Malmkrog. And even though the last hour of the film is essentially a repetition of what has gone before, dragging an already long experience out further, there is something undeniably ballsy about a film willing to be this singular and bloody-minded about its purpose.

Malmkrog is released on digital platforms on 26 March.