The Road Movie (Film Review)

2018 Oscilloscope
Directed by: Dmitrii Kalashnikov
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 67 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 6/10

The documentary, The Road Movie, is 67 straight minutes of assembled Russian vehicle dashboard camera footage. Cars crash violently. Strange people suddenly leap on windshields and refuse to get off. An asteroid burns through the skies over the foreground of a car hood. All the while, constant car chatter and music. People swearing in Russian. A lot. I never knew Russians swore so much. Then again, the skies always seems to be snowing, raining, or desolated. Maybe there's a reason they swear so much.
I went through an interesting emotional arc while watching Dmitrii Kalashnikov's film, which acts as one long montage of found footage. At first, I felt, people are people everywhere. We all react to weird stuff the same. Then I started to get angry. A theme began to appear from video to video: shut up, and keep moving. Hardly any in these videos ever helps someone in need. When the film reaches the footage of the crazy guy hopping onto the front of a poor woman's car, the most shocking element is that no one ever comes over to help her. She screams for help for minute upon minute, until she finally floors it and he falls off. "Don't stop, they'll think you did it," says an unseen woman when the driver of the car thinks about pulling over to help a crashed motorist. Tailgaters are often met with the car ahead of them stopping, and someone getting out with a hatchet, hammer, or gun. Sometimes, the people getting out seem to be wearing police uniforms. I wondered what kind of narrative Kalashnikov is pushing.
Is this a critique of Modern Russia? Is Kalashnikov trying to say that years of cold Stalinism and a lengthy and ruthless Putin regime have drained away his people's empathy? Or is he simply trying to say they have become a nation of fatalists? The final car crash ends with the driver saying "We're done." He's not the only one in The Road Movie to utter some variance of those words. Is that why there's so much footage of people indifferently passing by disaster? Sucks for them, but if I keep my head down, I just might make it a little longer myself.
The best line (in a film which includes the driver of a car that's run off the highway and landed in a river exclaiming the words "Holy shitball, we're sailing!") comes from a woman who's just witnessed a violent crash. "Oh merciful Lord!" she says. "What's wrong with all these cars?" Indeed.