Vampires and sundry supernatural evils populate Moscow in the movie Night Watch, and it is they, not nuclear weapons, that could bring about the apocalypse.
Since the Byzantine era, the Light and Dark forces—known collectively as the “Others”—have been bound in an uneasy truce, putting the apocalypse on hold. Fast forward to 21st-century Moscow, where the Light forces comprise the Night Watch, which protects the innocents of the city and issues licenses to vampires and dark Others. The penalties for practicing without a license are steep in this quirky sci-fi vision.
The protaganist, Anton Gorodetsky (Konstantin Khabensky), is the seer of the Night Watch who can detect and track Others. Gorodetsky’s teenage neighbor is an aspiring vampire, but he interacts with him fearlessly, as the boy is harmless until he receives his license. Only in the former Soviet Union could the practice of evil be this bureaucratized.
From this neighbor, Gorodetsky borrows not cups of sugar, but glasses of blood, the nourishment he needs to do his work. He also obtains some women’s clothing for his partner (Galina Tyunina), who has recently returned to her human shape after being confined to the body of an owl for 60 years. Bearing a marked resemblance to Khrushchev, Vladimir Menshov (who directed Moscow Does not Believe in Tears, the Best Foreign Film of 1981) leads the Light forces and guides Gorodetsky.
In the course of his work, Gorodetsky discovers the existence of his 12-year-old illegitimate son, Yegor (Dmitry Martynov), who is also an Other and shows an early propensity for greatness. The dark side is very interested in him. Gorodetsky cannot bond long with his son, however as the Night Watch has to save Moscow by tracking down a cursed woman with a “dark vortex of damnation” spiraling over her head. When the plot grows convoluted and unwieldy, director Timur Bekmambetov tends to award the still-attentive viewer with a great visual nugget: he shows the woman with the vortex problem on the metro, wearing huge glasses with her hair swirling up over her head, though the air in the car is still.
The action sweeps through a surprisingly realistic Moscow, from the bowels of the metro to the roofs of decaying Soviet high-rises. Bekmambetov makes no attempt to airbrush the city; the grit and chaos that permeate real-life Moscow are translated carefully onscreen, to the movie’s benefit. This is the same grime and desperation seen in such recent Russian films as Brother (1997) and the Russian-Swedish production Lilya 4-Ever (2002), but in Night Watch the supernatural permeates everything.
Based on the Sergei Lukyanenko’s science fiction novels, Night Watch is the first part of a trilogy. When it was released in Russia in summer 2004, it quickly became the country’s highest grossing film. Day Watch, the sequel, was released in Russia on Jan. 1.
At a recent Washington screening, the crowd seemed equally split between middle-aged sci-fi fanatics and Russian expats yearning for some taste of home. Fox Searchlight is marketing the film in the West, and there is no mention that Night Watch is a Russian-language film anywhere in its extensive marketing materials. The opening battle scene of the film is narrated in English with a vaguely Eastern European accent, before the dialogue switches to Russian. Perhaps in an attempt to placate the audience, the subtitles are highly stylized, often floating around the screen or imbued with redness.
Though Night Watch was made by a state-owned Russian television company with a meager budget of $5 million (a fraction of The Matrix’s budget, estimated at $63 million), it is among the most visually compelling pictures produced in recent years. When Gorodetsky determines someone is an Other, his or her head is briefly reduced to a nest of glowing, pulsating blood vessels and nerve endings. To brief the audience on the mythology of the Others, the director skillfully employs charcoal-based animation. Unfortunately, the overly jarring heavy metal soundtrack that accompanied this powerful imagery detracts from the action.
Long after the nebulous plot is forgotten, the imagery lingers with you. While it is hard to care about the characters’ fates, it is clear Bekmambetov will dazzle visually in Day Watch and Dusk Watch. Nightwatch will be playing at the E Street Cinema starting Friday, February 24.
