Russian cinema is known for its dark and moody cinema, but upcoming film maker Kirill Sokolov is here to shake things up with his feature debut, Why Don’t You Just Die!. With Why Don’t You Just Die! writer and director Sokolov demonstrates the visual style and flair of early Tarantino. The plot itself follows the Pulp Fiction formula of one over-arching story told through the eyes of several separate characters. We begin with Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who ends up getting more than he bargained for after meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.
What makes Why Don’t You Just Die! so ingenious is that it’s unrelenting in its originality. It’s not often that you get a film that is a blend of crime drama, action thriller, and dark comedy, and it’s even more scarce to find one that pulls off all those components in such an accomplished way. Russian films especially have never been this much fun; the film takes on an almost cartoonish energy with its handling of violence and gore. There’s a fight soon after the opening moments that is almost unlike any movie fight you’ve seen before; it feels simultaneously mundane and insane. The mundane comes from the things that our combatants are sparring with, whilst the insanity comes from what they do with those items. The camera weaves beautifully around the battle getting some very interesting and fresh camera angles that garner comparisons to Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade.
Playing over this heightened action is a score that feels much more like it belongs in a Laurel and Hardy sketch than accompanying a smack-down. This juxtaposition is intentional though and exquisitely conveys the off-kilter Saturday morning cartoon tone. It’s not the expected arrangement for what is essentially a crime thriller. Rather than being dark, gritty and moody, it is instead buoyant, lively and jovial, confirming again that this isn’t a film that takes itself seriously. The score punctuates the action unfolding on screen, and with the script being fairly dialogue-light, it instils an almost silent-movie like charm.
Director Kirill Sokolov also wrote the film. As inspiration came around the time of the inception of the #MeToo moment after hearing an awful story from a friend, Why Don’t You Just Die! was originally imagined purely from Matvei’s point of view. Upon finishing the first draft though, Sokolov realised that having the main character fairly stationary for two-thirds of the run-time didn’t make for that compelling a watch. So he went back to the drawing board and decided, much like Pulp Fiction, to split the story up and tell it from several different angles. By doing this Sokolov ensures that the viewer never has time to get bored or frustrated with any individual character. Each character goes on their own journey within the overarching plot, and as we shift focus from one to the other, thoughts and opinions on them evolve and change.
Personally, the strongest character is that of Matvei. He’s our introduction into the world and, despite the way in which he behaves, is the most moral and honest of them all. Granted he’s also the most put-upon and certainly goes through the wringer more than most, but all these hardships just serve to endear Matvei to the audience. He’s a character that shows a lot of courage, MacGyver-level problem solving skills, and more resilience to pain and torture that Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and The Terminator combined.
If you’re looking for a film to escape from the weird world we currently find ourselves in then you can’t do much better than Why Don’t You Just Die! It’s a fun, funny, frenetically charged twisting tale that may very well have introduced us to the next Quentin Tarantino.
Why Don’t You Just Die! is released on Blu-Ray and Digital HD from Monday 20th April 2020 via Arrow Videos. It arrives on the Arrow Video Channel on 4th May 2020.
