Somewhere on this godforsaken Earth. Journalists would probably call it a ‘civil war’, but it’s more of a gaping wound festering with excessive and random violence, a moral quagmire of massacre, looting, rape and torture. In this midst of this chaos, Tamara is looking for her son, who was abducted by organ traffickers. Nobody to help her, except for one man: the “Steppenwolf”, a reformed ex-convict who has permanently left the shores of Good and Evil. It hasn’t got anything to do with goodness of heart or God forbid, a ‘soul’. He’s not helping Tamara, he’s using her. He isn’t looking for any redemption and to him, justice is just another one of those empty meaningless words. The Steppenwolf is a ruthless monster who kills without remorse. And yet, he’s the one that comes closest to the hollow concept of humanity she so desperately clings onto…

If you’re not yet familiar with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, get on with it! The dark lining was already present in his previous flick ASSAULT, but here the Kazakh wunderkind delivers his highly personal reading of THE SEARCHERS mixed with the titular work of Hermann Hesse. The result is stunning, as formally beautiful as it is thematically ugly, unleashing a flood of nihilism that devours everything on its path. A wandering, almost surreal path of hyper-violent scenes in which no one, not even women and children, is spared.