Fantasia Review: 'Steppenwolf' Tells The 'John Wick' Movies To Eff Off

By Jason Adams | Film | August 8, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | August 8, 2024 |

The John Wick movies have become my recent go-to when referencing movies that pornographically showcase violence. Their video-game fetishization of gun-play makes me sick to my stomach—the films try to have it both ways, pretending they’re contemplations of “civilization” while simultaneously being just goofs about bad dudes who hurt the cute lil’ doggy and therefore deserve the vengeance that Wick delivers unto them. Walking the razor-thin line of that mixed messaging is, to my eye, beyond their sloppy abilities, where everything within them is done with a wink; stylization run amok. But such is not the case with Steppenwolf, a pitch-black rumination on the ruination of man and his violence from Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov, and which just screened at Fantasia. Mordantly funny when need be and savagely psyche-ravaging the rest, this might just be a new masterpiece. And Yerzhanov is most definitely a filmmaker of determined means to seek out.

Herman Hesse’s 1927 book Steppenwolf is about a dude named Harry who’s so afraid of his baser instincts (“the wolves of the steppes” if you will) that he’s contemplating suicide. But Harry learns how to put that seeming inevitability off indefinitely when he meets a woman who laughs at his self-indulgences, and shows him what living’s all about. (Some would describe the book in bleaker terms than that, but that’s always been my takeaway.) Meanwhile Steppenwolf the 2024 film—which is not an adaptation, but does begin with a quote from the book—is about a broken psychopath named Brajyuk (Berik Aitzhanov), who gave in to his wolves of the steppes a long, long time ago, well before we come to meet this monster who stands before us.

Brajyuk is, and I really cannot underline this enough, an awful, awful person. Where John Wick’s brutality is celebrated by his movies, Yerzhanov makes Brajyuk into such a horrendous villain of a man that the “hero” half of “anti-hero” gets entirely obliterated. And yet Brajyuk, who we first meet mutilating innocent political prisoners and who only gets worse from there, is indeed our “hero” for this film’s one hundred minutes. He’s a gleeful torturer, a sadist, a ghoul of cruelty and unkindness who wears heart-shaped sunglasses as he murders remorselessly, without hesitation. And when he props a living person up in front of gunfire to save himself it comes with none of the sick pleasure that such scenes in typical Schwarzenegger-esque action cinema indulge. It’s a wet thud of monstrosity.

But just like his counterpart in Hesse’s book, Brajyuk does indeed soon meet a woman—one who, if not changes him, forever reshapes his path. Her name is Tamara (Anna Starchenko) and she just wanders into the gray slab of fog-fueled war-zone where Brajyuk is busy doing his dirty business, sliding her sliver of self in between the bursts of violence like a ghost. Barely able to speak, a colorless shell-shocked whisper of a woman, Tamara somehow manages to stutter out to Brajyuk, and to anyone who will stop shooting their guns long enough to listen, that her little boy has gone missing. And that she must find him. She must find him. She must find him.

Brajyuk couldn’t care less. He shoves her around, hits her, tells her to get lost. You honestly think he might use her as a bullet-shield at any moment. And yet like the presence in It Follows, Tamara keeps being there behind him. Keeps muttering the same words at him. And Brajyuk begins to take notice, as do we, of the weird way her presence seems to re-form reality around her—the way guns stop working; the way the people he’s trying to kill keep stopping dead in their tracks whenever she is noticed. And this awful man sees in her an opportunity—now this is something he can properly exploit!

Weaponizing a traumatized woman paralyzed by unfathomable grief is, to put it plainly, one of the most despicable actions I’ve ever seen put on-screen. And Brajyuk does it with great, sick-making cheer. He manipulates his foes time and time again by putting Tamara into harm’s way—telling them she’s got heaps of money to give to whomever finds her son; plopping her down as a distraction as she stands stiff, barely reactive amongst the carnage.

That said Tamara’s preternatural ability to walk through raging violence herself unharmed reminds me of another devastatingly stark anti-war war-film beamed out like a ray of hellfire from the former Soviet bloc—Elem Klimov’s 1985 soul-breaker Come and See, which charts a young boy named Flyora’s path through the unimaginable Nazi atrocities that happened in Belarus during World War II, and which is often listed on internet listicles of “The Most Shocking Movies Ever Made” alongside goofy gore-fest pablum like Cannibal Holocaust. For its part Come and See earns its spot on such lists by simply, properly giving War its un-sugarcoated cinematic due, aging its apple-cheeked protagonist decades in days as he stumbles Forrest-Gump-like through the worst true things a person could ever imagine.

And there’s some of that in Tamara and her treatment in Steppenwolf’s world. It’s truly, deeply shocking to see a devastated mother propped about like she’s the third Stooge. But Yerzhanov isn’t playing—like Flyora before her, Tamara overwhelms her circumstances to become a figure of mystic consequence; a storytelling invention that could be our only way through this hell space. The film is aware of its cinematic necessities—of its plotting from points A to Z. And it uses her, an angel holding our hand to lead us through the humiliations of war’s callous indifference.

Symbolism is really the only way to communicate that experience without the experience itself, and so Brajyuk’s cruelty also leaps in equal and opposite measure toward mythic proportions—wait until you see what his visit home to see his parents is like. We’ve found ourselves amongst ghosts and devils here, with violence given the proper weight in devastation that it demands. Yerzhanov is telling us to be furious. Late in the film in two stunning monologues Brajyuk and Tamara give their opposing views on the necessity of goodness in the world, and it’s as if we’re right back on the beach playing chess with Max von Sydow and Death again. It’s digging that deep; aiming that high. (This is also, I feel the need to get in here somewhere, a stunningly photographed and scored film that burns right through the screen.)

You also might not notice it until its final shot (which is to say that I didn’t notice it sooner but probably should have, and am embarrassed I didn’t) but Yerzhanov’s Steppenwolf is also a riff on John Ford’s legendary 1956 Western The Searchers—generally considered the greatest Western there is. In The Searchers John Wayne up-ended his typical cowboy hero archetype to play the racist asshole Ethan Edwards, who goes off into the desert to kill the Native Americans who kidnapped his niece, and then to probably kill his niece while he’s at it since she’s been no doubt corrupted from her time among the “savages.”

It does turn out that Brajyuk’s brokenness is more complicated than it might seem, and also entwined in vital ways with Tamara’s own story—but like with Ford, Yerzhanov only asks us to go so far in trying to understand and empathize with the impulses of broken men. They are left on the other side of the door-frame, in the wilderness, out among the horror. Positivity and light is not their gift at their story’s end. Brajyuk (and Aitzhanov’s absolutely massive performance in the role) is not charisma—he is gravity. A slippery black-hole pull toward the centers of our guts. And giving in to our inner darkness, Steppenwolf shows, just leaves a trail of guts dragged through the sand.