Past Misdeeds: Prikosnoveniye (1992)

aka (The) Contact

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Olga Nikolayevna kills her little son Kolya and then herself. Andrey (Aleksandr Zuyev), the most laid-back and friendly cop in Russia, gets on the case. His investigation leads the policeman to Olga's lover. At first, the man - who has an undefeatable alibi - tries to warn Andrey off from any further enquiries, but when the cop persists and waves off any danger, the man explains that he knows well why Olga and Kolya died: Olga's father had convinced her that the afterlife needed her, life on Earth being no good anyhow, and after a long time of pushing and prodding, she agreed. The most troubling part of that story is the fact that Olga's father has been dead for twelve years. Supposedly, the father's shrouded ghost had been visiting his daughter regularly for years.

Shortly after their talk, Andrey's witness hangs himself.

Not surprisingly, the policeman doesn't buy the dead man's story completely, but since his own theory is that a group of mobster uses hypnosis and psychological tricks to drive people to suicide, one can't exactly call him a sceptic. Andrey's further investigations lead him to Olga's sister Marina (Maryana Polteva). Marina, too, says she is regularly visited by her dead father, and has now also had a little visit by her sister and nephew. Her father, she explains, belongs to a class of creatures called the Forzy. These "Forzy" are ghosts who spend their time driving good people to suicide because these people are supposedly needed in the afterlife and not on Earth. Consequently, Marina's dad has been haranguing her to be a good girl and kill herself for years now.

Andrey's relative scepticism soon enough dissolves, because he too witnesses things he can't explain in any natural way. One suspects that Andrey falling in love with Marina also quickens his growing belief in the supernatural.

When the rude dead people try to kill Marina's little daughter to make her mother more susceptible to suicidal thoughts, Andrey tries to make a pact with Marina's dead father. He will stop being a good person if the dead guy will only leave him, the two people he already sees as his family and his beloved dog in peace. That pact is easier made then held, though, for these are ghosts that can already be angered by hearing Andrey's catchphrase "life is amazing and beautiful", which is a bit of an overreaction to sentimentality if you ask me.

There's way too little information about Russian genre movies of the early 90s online in any language I can understand, so I have to treat a movie like Prikosnoveniye as an artefact of a time and place for filmmaking that is somewhat strange and impenetrable.

What is clear is that Albert S. Mkrtchyan's movie was produced on a pretty low budget. Special effects - even when they would be useful to further the film's cause - are few and far between, and what there is of them is of the kind that gets the idea of what they are supposed to represent across, but not much more. Fortunately, Mkrtchyan was obviously conscious of this problem, and so decided to trust his audience's imagination and just don't show much of the supernatural for large parts of the film, instead using hints and ambiguity. The best demonstration of the director's technique in this regard is surely the scene in which Andrey makes his pact with the dead man. Andrey talks to the unmoving picture of his enemy on a gravestone, and is answered (or is he?) via announcements over the speaker of a railway station that is situated close-by. It's a wonderfully budget-conscious way to connect the supernatural and everyday life. Because Prikosnoveniye is even stranger at heart than that, the scene's end finds Andrey suddenly in Kiev, far from the graveyard he has been in before, without the faintest idea how he got there.

The budgetary problems only become visible as problems once the movie has reached its final act and an action sequence and a collapsing building are called for. The former is staged incredibly awkwardly, while the latter is frankly a bit crap. Both sequences fit the dramatic escalation of the plot, but are tonally at odds with the slow sly cleverness of the rest of the movie.

Which is a bit of a problem seeing as how the movie's rather philosophical tone in its first two thirds is its greatest strength. Said tone is - at least for eyes like mine not terribly accustomed to the way Russian and Soviet films works - strange in the best meaning of the word. Formally and visually, Mkrtchan's film has a feeling of dry, sometimes even bland, realism, full of scenes that go on slightly too long and that put more observational energy on the quotidian (watch Andrey play with his dog, watch Andrey's colleague make dinner while they discuss stuff the audience already knows, etc.) than is usual even in horror films that are about the break-in of the exceptional into the quotidian. Even the scenes where Andrey and Marina discuss the ghostly conspiracy are filmed in this way, giving them a veneer of normality the patently outrageous ideas expressed in them should have nothing to do with.

Under the film's seemingly bland and calm surface, though, lies an undertone of true strangeness and a world view that borders on the nihilist. The film never comes right out and says if it agrees with the ghosts, and never defines if they are malevolent or on the level with their disgust for life as we know it, but that makes the philosophical horror behind it them more effective than a more direct Liggottian statement about the absurdity of life would have done.

Beside its nihilist side and its distressed realism, the film has even more to offer. There's another underlying level where Prikosnoveniye also uses the structure of a fairy tale for its purposes - the relative easiness with which everyone accepts the supernatural, the pact with the dead and the ruination of the pact through the repeated (of course thrice) utterance of a very specific phrase all belong into the realm of the fairy tale, and seem to dance a very peculiar dance with the film's surface blandness as well as with its philosophical horrors.


What Prikosnoveniye isn't, is a horror movie that does much (or, if you're only used to horror films of the last few decades, anything) that's horrifying on its surface level. That's no problem at all for me, but if your tastes run to films more directly scary, this will most probably not be your cup of tea.