January – the horse-drawn sled returns… without its driver

JANUARY
Directed by Andrey Paounov
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

NATURE’S reclamation of post-industrial landscapes is a well-worn motif. Evergreens cracking through concrete are used as a metaphor for decay – but in Andrey Paounov’s odd and unashamedly obscure mystery thriller, the boundaries between demise and regeneration are indistinguishable.

The Guard (Samuel Finzi) is overseeing the winter maintenance of a set of buildings deep in snowbound woods. His company is an alcoholic old man (Iossif Surchadzhiev), a cage-kept crow and a growling dog.

The quiet is disturbed when two men appear at their door asking about a tractor owned by a man called Peter Motorov – the absentee boss in this strange set-up. The pair need a hand dragging their snowplough out of a drift. They discover Peter left for town that morning on the back of a horse-drawn sled, and when it returns without him, the mildly uncomfortable air about the place turns threatening.

The wolf-prowled woods offer a permanently sinister presence – made all the more so when questions arise about Peter’s wellbeing and the only way to see if he is OK is to button up the furs and head out into the snow yourself…

As well as a cheaply atmospheric organ-based soundtrack, each scene is accompanied by well-placed creaks – the building moving in the wind, the crow pecking at bars, the footsteps on wonky floorboards and the cranking of pistons in ageing engines. It is not immediately clear what sort of a industry is based in this outpost: obscure equipment dotted about gives it a W Heath Robinson look.

And Paounov’s post-Communist Bulgaria looks closer to the 19th century than the 21st. It’s a place of worn-out regression, and the idea that the wolf has re-emerged to be above humans in the food chain adds to this end-of-the-world feel.

He based the story on a 1974 play by Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov, which spoke of the loss of a peasant society in the face of urban-driven modernisation. Here, it is the same concept but in reverse.

This film suggests that the post-industrial world does not just mean nature reclaiming these isolated Soviet factories hidden in virgin lands that never became the brave new cities dictators envisaged. As well as the triumph of the natural world over a failed economic and social experiment, magic and mystery also returns. The mystique of the forests and steppes that created so many fairy tales is creeping back and taking over.