Side Effect (2020)

Original title: Pobochnyi effekt

Following a home invasion and an attempted rape that resulted in the loss of their unborn child, the marriage of singer Olya (Marina Vasileva) and architect Andrey (Semyon Serzin) is on the ropes. They’re now separated from each other, with Andrey desperately trying to win Olya back and somehow drag her into better mental health at the same time; not a winning combination, that.

We’ll never quite figure out what Olya thinks about what happened and Andrey’s guilt in the proceedings until very late in the film, but Andrey himself feels particularly guilty for not having done some stupid violent thing that would only have gotten him killed to protect her. Eventually he is desperate enough to go to the witch Mara (Aleksandra Revenko), whose fungi-based spellcraft is supposed to be the absolute state of the magical art. Andrey simply wants a spell to make Olya forget what happened, which surely will make his own guilt disappear as well, and bring their marriage back on the old track, right?

As it happens, Mara not only provides a fine little fungus for Andrey to secretly – what’s “consensual”? – feed to Olya to do the partial amnesia job, but also wants the couple to housesit her large apartment in a constructivist nightmare of a building. Apparently, so that the spores in the air there can do their job on Olya, and Mara’s fungi will be properly fumigated while she’s away.

At first, things go as Andrey had hoped, and Olya not just gets back with him the very same night she has imbibed a fungus-enhanced cake but actually seems to feel somewhat happier. To nobody’s surprise but Andrey’s, things don’t stay positive once the couple moves into Mara’s apartment. While Olya indeed begins to forget parts of her trauma and even the traumatic event itself, she gets flashes and spurts of the rape attempt that seem even worse than before because they now lack in any real life context she can remember. Other disturbing things begin happening as well, of course. Why, it’s as if Mara – a rather present absence in her apartment – has some sort of very unkind plan for the couple.

Aleksey Kazakov’s Side Effect is rather different from the somewhat more generic Russian horror movies I’ve seen during the last few years. There’s something rather more serious-minded about the film, and it is clearly an honest attempt at exploring the results of trauma and guilt on a relationship through its tale of pretty nasty witchcraft. Even our villainess’s evil is the result of a trauma of her own, just that her reaction to it is an attempt to perpetuate her own suffering on others unlucky enough to remind her of it.

The further the film gets into its plot, the more it expresses its interests through a mix of surrealism and the folkloric, using potent images from Slavic folklore to position itself right at the border between a very dark fairy-tale and more free-floating strangeness to try and speak of dark and sad psychological currents through the lens of the Weird.

It’s a very interesting attempt at this kind of exploration, making much of moody as well as meaningful production design, and taking on an increasingly nightmarish as well as metaphorical quality, where someone’s death can be easily reversed only to increase a person’s suffering, and where the ghosts of the past can put a very physical effort into helping out the living.