Morphia is Balabanov's second film playing at the Rotterdam filmfestival. Last year his Cargo 200 played in Rotterdam as well. Morphia is just as macabre as Cargo 200, with its explicitly shown surgeries and amputations.
The film is about a doctor who starts to work in a country village. He gets addicted to morphine which leads to a fatal accident, which is his fault because he switched the morphine with different medicines. He goes to a rehabilition centre to get rid of his addiction, but fails.
The script is based on events that happened during the 1917 civil war, during the Bolshevik revolution. It was screenwriter Sergei Bodrov Jr. 's last script. He passed away in 2002. It depicts a surreal, but realistic view of the madness that occurred in Russia at the time. Balabanov seems the perfect choice of director to make it into a film.
Morphia is a raw film, it doesn't try to hide anything. Instead it shows you more than you want to see. Like in one of the first scenes, there's an intertitle that says: first amputation, but you may have wished it would have said last amputation. On the other hand, when the doctor does it, it seems like a perfectly normal routine, it's just how they did it back then. Balabanov is known for his dark and sinister view, he's a controversial filmmaker. But also one of the best contemporary Russian filmmakers.
****1/2 (out of 5)
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