On March 18th, a press screening of the family film “Zhdun” took place, with the public premiere scheduled for March 20th. We went to the cinema to see if they managed to revive the very Zhdun from the memes in people’s memories. We share our thoughts on how the film turned out and whether it’s worth taking your children to see it or watching it yourself.
An ordinary family lives in a decidedly luxurious mansion in Abrau-Dyurso. The husband works at some kind of scientific start-up center, the wife stays at home, ordering either a new kitchen or a family boat trip, and the children – an adventurous boy Nikita and his clever sister – do nothing but stroll and relax by the pool. It’s vacation time! Everything is, in general, just like everyone else. Oh, and there’s also a grandfather who, after his wife’s death, decided to shut himself off from everyone and live separately in a cozy shed near the mansion.
One fine day, a meteorite of alien origin falls to Earth. Evil men are sent to search for it, ordered to retrieve innovative technologies, but Nikita gets ahead of them, accidentally finding Zhdun and his ship in the reeds. Nikita and Zhdun quickly become friends and decide to team up to help Zhdun return home. To do this, they need to fix the “Flyer,” from which the “antigraviton” fell out, which was taken by the head of the scientific start-up center corporation. That seems to be it. Well, and traditionally, for this, the entire Semenov family needs to solve internal and external problems, unite, and become closer to each other. Like in a fairy tale.
Perhaps one of the worst and most terrible problems of this film is that it is very difficult to believe in. Even if you really want to, even (perhaps) if you look at it from the point of view of childish spontaneity. It feels fake in a huge number of details, inconsistencies, and character reactions. It’s like seeing a dream with a trickster who seems like your friend, but suddenly you notice how he puts his watch not on his wrist, but on his ankle. At that moment, you realize that something is definitely wrong with him, that he is lying to you, even though you hoped to become friends. It’s the same in “Zhdun”: a creepily smiling mother supposedly pours tea for her husband, but due to an editing error, tea does not pour from the teapot. Or, for example, there is a scene in which the boy and Zhdun are met by the grandfather in the reeds, and such infernal light is set on the reeds, as if you are looking at 3D pictures in a magazine through red and green glasses. One thought comes to mind: “This is all unreal, they are lying to you, run, Zhdun.” Or here’s another: the girl feeds poor Zhdun lemons, and he sucks them in like a vacuum cleaner. And it doesn’t matter that it looks more like ancient Chinese torture, the main thing is that she is having fun.
The narratives and themes of the film themselves are false. For example, take the mother of the main character Nikita: she seems to be a kind woman who does nothing bad, but with her actions, she deliberately buries her husband in a debt pit. And the father? He has two children, a wife, and an unemployed grandfather to support. At one point, he himself loses his job due to the evil head of the start-up, but instead of actually looking for work, he plays detective, tracking down his own relatives. Even in the key plot about Zhdun, there are inconsistencies: the whole family reacts so normally to the alien that it seems as if they saw some awkward distant relative of their own. As if they themselves are strange Zhduns, and he is the only normal one. This feeling continues to linger also because of the “unreality” of their life – a million questions arise about how many children live in luxurious mansions in Abrau-Dyurso so that they have many toys, a private pool, and panoramic windows. And regardless of the moment, the refrigerator is always full. If the authors wanted to make fun of stereotypes a little, they managed to fall into the deepest uncanny valley.
Everything else, as you might guess, corresponds to a certain norm. The protagonist family’s storyline is about working through old traumas and finding common ground again, the antagonists’ arc is about understanding that greed is bad and you need to respect other people. Classics that are supposed to teach young viewers something.
Regarding humor, everything is generally complicated here, because it seems like sometimes you smile yourself, and sometimes even the children in the hall maintain a deathly silence. They are not as stupid as they seem, they perfectly distinguish toilet humor from something really good. By the way, about the not bad: there is a feeling that the creators of this miracle deliberately left a subtle reference to Disco Elysium, because who else discovers amazing intelligent beings in the reeds?
In general, your humble servant, unfortunately, could not withstand the oppressive feeling of emptiness and left the hall before the film came to a logical conclusion. Therefore, there will be no spoilers regarding whether the poor Zhdun returned from this terrible unreal planet to his native one. The first emotion after leaving the hall was absolute anger, which then grew into sadness and acceptance. Perhaps such films are needed for something. If only to understand the average temperature in the hospital of filmmakers wishing to escape from painful reality.
