Trouble comes to a small Yakut village. High school student Aita returns home with her friends after a party: the noisy and drunken company is first taken to the police, and Aita, the only sober among them, is released. One of the patrol officers, Athanasius (Andrey Fomin), is summoned to release him. When the girl comes home, she makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt – sensing that something is wrong, her mother rescues her. The unconscious girl is taken to the hospital, where she dies without regaining consciousness.
Aita leaves a suicide note after her in which she admits to her heartbroken parents and a certain Afonya she hates. Athanasius, the police officer who raises Aita, is immediately suspicious – “something that isn’t so,” according to the general opinion of a foreigner and locals. As the villagers prepare to lynch the suspect, local detective Nikolai (Innokenty Lukovtsev) may be the only one trying to keep his sanity.
Nikolai refuses to get ahead of events, but there is no time to save. Aita’s father, along with his friends and with a few weapons at the ready, fears that the corrupt system will “find its way” again, and therefore demands that Athanasius be extradited to them without trial or investigation. A small village becomes a battlefield, a police station becomes a fortress, and the human heart turns into a bloody mess.
The film’s director, Stepan Burnashev, is an incredibly prolific writer. Only last year, in addition to the hysterical “Aita”, she managed to release a melodrama about the fragility of the family “Our Winter” and the gloomy horror “The Curse”. Dead floor”. However, what seems to be the most mature picture in the director’s filmography is Aita, which he wrote with his constant co-author Svetlana Taayko.
Intentional or accidental, but the name Aita refers to the Etruscan name Eita, the name of the ruler of the underworld, similar to the Greek Hades. Thus, Aita’s tragic story reveals in the heroes their deepest and most hidden feelings. Those who had accumulated grudges and bitterness first took up arms, and those who tried to live according to their conscience found themselves at the crossroads of a terrible moral choice: to believe the suspect who insisted on his innocence, or to get angry. villagers who fear that the guilty person will not be duly punished.
Human anger gradually turns into a tragedy that has room for different things: both criticism of law enforcement who discredits it more than once (despite the fact that the security forces in the film have only a human face) and forced quarters of people of different nationalities and cultures, and where people are condemned to fight each other for centuries. an almost Shakespearean desperation around the world.
It is not in vain that the recognizable “I do not distinguish all of you” sound several times in the film called the white Athanasius, who does not know the language or culture of the region in which he lives. and business. A little later, this will be echoed by a similar mockery of locals: “What did you want? You Russians look the same to us.”
The lack of communication between the characters transforms a small Yakut village into a modern Babylon, where people are cut off from each other, sitting in different corners of the frame and terribly angry at each other. Director Burnashev tries to capture all the pain, disappointments and fears of the heroes in close-ups. replaced by a gun and no one can return.
The bleakness of the visuals and the agony of the story somehow lead Aita to associate Villeneuve with “Prisoners”, which was released exactly 10 years ago. In both films, the victims’ helpless fathers become fathers who punish them with their own fists. The images of the hero-investigators also look similar: law enforcement officers, restrained from the outside, but boiling from the inside, feeling their powerlessness in front of everyone they could not save.
While The Captives seems a little more creative in terms of script, “Aita” does not try to surprise with plot acrobatics. It’s a typical story about petty people and great evil, about an insane crime and a punishment that must abide by the Penal Code. And the worst thing in this whole story is not even how other people manipulate us, but how easily we let them do it to us.