MS Slavic 7 review – is this 2020’s dullest film?

There’s a lot to dislike about Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s semi-experimental docudrama MS Slavic 7. It’s self-indulgent, abysmally acted, unimaginatively shot and hideously lit. Above all else, it’s incredibly boring. It takes the notion of a “film about nothing” to such an extreme that it almost deserves commendation for the audacity, with so many long, static, silent shots of reading in a library or waiting for a bus that it feels like an elaborate in-joke at the expense of its audience.

Co-director Campbell plays a slightly fictionalised version of fellow director Bohdanowicz, who is going over the gentle and intimate letters of correspondence between her Polish poet great grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczoha, and a fellow Polish writer, Jozef Wittlin. We occasionally get to see the contents of these letters, and there are some memorable turns of phrase hidden in there, suggesting the potential for an interesting long distance romance.

Unfortunately, MS Slavic 7 is largely uninterested in exploring these possibilities, instead focusing on the dull daily routines and conversations of Sofia’s life, whether she’s explaining the “object-hood” of letters themselves or making coffees in bland hotel rooms. Sofia’s research is interspersed with scenes of her at a family reunion party, where she butts heads with an antagonistic aunt (Elizabeth Rucker, giving the worst of a very bad bunch of performances). These scenes serve to pad the film out to technically feature length – the one saving grace here is the tiny 65-minute runtime – but offer very little in the way of interest.

MS Slavic 7 tells a dull, niche story in an unengaging and visually ugly way, the cinematic equivalent of a stranger in a pub accosting you about their dissertation thesis.

MS Slavic 7 is now streaming on MUBI.