Set in a melancholy Belarus under threat from the Russia-Ukraine war, Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s White Snail centers on the burgeoning relationship between Masha (Marya Imbro), an aspiring teen model, and Misha (Mikhail Senkov), a mortuary technician and amateur painter. The pair encounter each other when Masha seeks information regarding a deceased man with whom she briefly shared a hospital ward, following her own recent suicide attempt. That not-so-cute meet-cute sets the tone for a film that can be oppressively subdued at times, but that’s offset by the icy elegance of its handheld cinematography, which effectively renders the loneliness of its characters and the poignancy of its Minsk setting.
Keeping a snail as a pet (as well as using it as a skincare treatment) and carrying a black umbrella around the city to protect her from the sunlight, the emotionally detached Masha has a kind of Gen Z goth affect, apparently informed by the performance of beauty that she learns in modelling school. While her successful embodiment of this role makes her the student most likely to secure gigs, this leads to resentment in her outwardly friendly classmates, which exacerbates the sense of isolation that her parents’ separation seems to have caused.
As such, Masha’s fascination with oddball loner Misha’s death-oriented work duties and expressionist art is so logical that it feels on the nose, as can the parallels that are drawn between the methodical autopsy of a cadaver and the way talent agents coldly dissect Masha’s striking elfin looks. Imbro and Senkov’s deliver restrained, impressively nuanced performances, but it’s hard to shake that there’s a crucially missing sense of tension to their characters’ quasi-romance, while the script also leaves their deeper emotional needs a little too vague.
And as much as White Snail tries to hew to a naturalistic sensibility, key emotional beats—like a cathartic karaoke session, an intimate night-time scooter ride along a deserted road, and a tense lakeside getaway—brush close to cliché. Which makes a climactic lyrical moment that breaks from the film’s studied minimalism to indirectly evoke a deeper kinship between the main characters, and one potentially existing on the level of nature itself, all the more striking.
The film could have benefitted from indulging in more of these offbeat digressions, burrowing deeper into its own appealing strangeness as well as the morbid outlook of its protagonists, which seems an entirely comprehensible, organic response to a war-torn, image-obsessed society that feels increasingly dehumanizing and empty. In the end, White Snail is mostly memorable for its depiction of a city gradually hollowing itself out, as geopolitical developments force those with the opportunity or the means to consider pursuing futures elsewhere.
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