A small Yakut village is shaken by trouble. After a party, a high school student named Aita returns home with friends. The drunken crowd is taken to the police, but Aita, the only one sober, is released. A patrol officer named Athanasius, played by Andrey Fomin, is dispatched to bring in a suspect. Once Aita arrives home, she makes a desperate bid for help, but her mother intervenes just in time. The girl is rushed to the hospital, where she slips into unconsciousness and dies.
Aita leaves a note for her grieving parents in which she mentions a broken heart and a certain Afonya she hates. Athanasius, the officer who has watched over Aita, is immediately suspected by locals and outsiders alike. As the village debates the possibility of a wrongful act, detective Nikolai, portrayed by Innokenty Lukovtsev, becomes the sole voice trying to hold onto his sanity in the escalating chaos.
Nikolai refuses to jump to conclusions, but time is not on anyone’s side. Aita’s father, backed by friends and armed with a few weapons, fears the system will pull the same tricks again and demands that Athanasius be handed over without trial. What began as a personal tragedy unfolds into a standoff, turning a quiet community into a war zone and a police station into a fortress, while human hearts turn raw and brutal.
The film’s director, Stepan Burnashev, has built a reputation for prolific storytelling. In the recent year, alongside the intense drama Escalation about a fragile family, he released other works that explored fear, guilt, and the fragility of trust. Aita emerges as perhaps the most mature project in Burnashev’s body of work, crafted with a steadfast writing partner, Svetlana Taayko.
The title Aita nods to ancient myth, evoking the underworld ruler and hinting at a deeper theme: hidden truths surface when anger pushes people to their limits. The characters reveal their deepest, most concealed feelings as old grievances flare and conscience prompts difficult choices. Should the accused be believed, or should the crowd’s fear drive them to seek swift justice? The village’s fear that guilt will go unpunished presses everyone toward decisive, sometimes brutal actions.
In the film, anger morphs into tragedy that touches many layers: a critique of law enforcement that shows a human face beneath the badge, tensions between diverse communities, and a reminder that long-standing rivalries can erupt across generations. The story probes how people, when faced with perceived threats, turn to reaction rather than reason and how quickly compassion can give way to fury.
The repeated refrain in the dialogue, where Athanasius is called the white officer who cannot fully grasp the local language or customs, underscores the broader miscommunication at the heart of the drama. Later, a biting joke—what did you expect, Russians looking the same to us—echoes the friction between outsiders and locals. The breakdown of communication converts the Yakut village into a contemporary Babylon, a place where everyone occupies a separate corner of the frame and eruptions of anger replace dialogue. Burnashev focuses on close-ups that capture the raw ache of the characters, while a gun becomes a grim symbol of consequence that cannot be undone.
The film’s atmosphere of bleak realism brings to mind the tension of celebrated thrillers like Prisoners, released a decade earlier. In both works, a grieving father—more determined than ever—condemns the system and enacts punishment with his own hands. The investigators share a restrained exterior while wrestling an inner sense of helplessness that they cannot change what fate has already sealed.
While Aita offers a tightly wound narrative, it does not rely on electric twists. It presents a straightforward story about flawed people confronting a grave evil, about a brutal crime, and about a punishment that must be measured against the law. The most unsettling truth lies not in manipulated outcomes, but in how easily a community allows itself to be steered by fear and anger, forgetting the basic humanity that binds them together.