The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1986)

Original title: Strannaya istoriya doktora Dzhekila I mistera Khayda

Lawyer Utterson (Anatoliy Adoskin) is worried about his friend and client Dr Henry Jekyll (Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy), a successful and rather virtuous (by Victorian standards of the term) physician. Jekyll has changed his will in a curious way – now, his entire fortune is supposed to go to one Mr. Edward Hyde (Aleksandr Feklistov), a complete unknown without any discernible connections to Jekyll. Curiouser still, Jekyll emphasises that Hyde shall inherit even if Jekyll just disappears for more than three months.

Utterson smells blackmail and dark plans, even more so since he learns that this Hyde is a person of vile tastes, a violent personality, and is perhaps involved in rather serious crimes. Jekyll becomes increasingly withdrawn from society, while Hyde appears to become more active with some dark business, until Utterson finally learns…

Well, what most everyone watching a movie concern this particular strange case will already know – Hyde and Jekyll are the good (more or less) and the evil (totally) side of the same man, divided (in a way) through an elixir Jekyll created in an attempt of completely repressing his worst impulses gone perfectly badly.

But then, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Aleksandr Orlov’s Soviet version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s genre-defining short novel that it mostly attempts to follow the book’s structure more closely than other adaptations – Utterson and theoretically the audience even finally learn the truth reading papers left by Jekyll, as in the novel proper. Though Orlov is still a filmmaker, so said papers lead to a series of flashbacks instead of the Utterson Reading Hour.

Given that Western adaptations of the material nearly always ignore the structure of Stevenson’s book completely, Orlov’s approach feels curiously fresh. Sure, Hyde’s identity won’t be a surprise to the viewer (unlike the original readers of the book, I assume), but there’s great joy in the slow reveal of details and the less straightforward presentation of the narrative that leaves little gaps for the audience to fill.

Visually, this is a fine film, a bit stodgily staged in some sequences but full of life and creativity in the more directly horrific scenes. Whenever Hyde appears – often capering and contorting himself like a character from an expressionist silent movie – the camera becomes particularly mobile, the angles as Dutch as Amsterdam, as if the world were visually coming askew with the presence of a force quite contrary to the slow and measured pace regular Victorian society likes to present. Which visually explains parts of the draw Hyde has for Jekyll – he’s a dancer of a kind in a place where even abominable acts are carried out with a stiff neck.

Increasing the silent movie influence, Orlov uses colours in ways that suggest tinting more than contemporary colour choices, with tones of sepia and blue often denoting the emotional impact of these scenes.

Quite contrary to the Victorian setting, the film’s score by Eduard Artemyev (who also scored various Tarkovsky films, among many other things) is synth based and sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in an Italian movie of the time, particularly during Hyde’s scenes. This adds an additional layer of mood and peculiarity to proceedings, something this version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde already has in spades.