Pyotr Ivanovich: Sometimes movies are just sad and gray

If you're looking for a Friday night popcorn flick, Pyotr Ivanovich is going to ruin your vibe immediately. It's for the crowd that likes their cinema cold, quiet, and full of people sighing in rooms with bad lighting. If you hate movies where 'nothing happens' for an hour, please, do yourself a favor and skip this one.

Ivan Bykov is playing the lead, and he does a lot of looking into the middle distance. There's this one scene where he’s just eating a piece of bread, and the camera stays on him for an eternity. I checked my watch twice. It wasn't profound, it was just… bread.

There's a texture to the film that feels like an old, damp wool coat. You can almost smell the dust. It reminded me a bit of the suffocating, quiet tension in The Price of Silence, but without the benefit of a clear mystery to keep you awake.

Oddly specific notes:

• The sound mixing is a disaster. Every footstep sounds like a gunshot.
• Mariya Shlenskaya has exactly three lines, but she steals the whole room just by standing there.
• The lighting in the kitchen scene is so dark I thought my screen had turned off.
• There is a cat that appears in the background of three different scenes, and it's the only thing that looks happy to be there.

The dialogue is sparse. It feels like the characters are allergic to sentences longer than five words. Maybe that's the point? It felt less like a script and more like a series of awkward silences broken by the occasional grunt.

I kept waiting for a pivot. Maybe a crime, or a sudden change of heart? But no. It just keeps trudging along like a horse in deep mud. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just exhausting.

If you liked Sudya Reytan, you might appreciate the bleakness here. But honestly? I think I needed a nap more than I needed to finish this. 🐈‍⬛

Some of the compositions are genuinely pretty, though. There's a shot of a window at dusk that I’d frame if I were into that kind of thing. Then again, a pretty frame doesn't save a movie that feels like it’s actively trying to bore you into submission.