For Ever & Ever – review

Director: Vladimir Chubrikov

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This Russian film is odd, in that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be and, perhaps even more so, takes some story shortcuts that sometimes make little sense and others make the story ring hollow as aspects have little to no consequence.

The vampires in the film are energy vampires specifically, and so the film is mostly bloodless and this fits in with it not knowing what it wants to be. It certainly doesn’t seem to have aspirations of being a horror film, but does seem to fancy itself a thriller (at least and at times).

deadly approach

Out in the woods a couple, an unnamed man and Anna, are out collecting firewood. He has strayed a little away when a woman with a severe haircut approaches him and leans in for a kiss (in this the power transference is often facilitated through a kiss). He falls dead and Anna, sensing something wrong, goes to find him. She sees the woman and beats a retreat in the opposite direction. Getting towards her cabin in the woods, she sees it being set alight. She flees into the snows.

Masha and Sasha

Sasha is a college professor and expert on Russian literature. He lives with his teenage daughter Masha and is divorced from her mother. He is going to drive her to school but the car has trouble starting (she moans about him not replacing the car) and so she goes to get the train. She is due to visit her mother soon. After his lecture, Sasha is driving home when he stops the car (to pick up some snow and put it on the bonnet – it made little sense to me). He sees a figure, Anna, staggering through the woods and gets to her as she collapses.

Anna

The doctor comes out to Anna – her temperature is normal but her blood pressure on the low side. Sasha lets her sleep and falls asleep at his desk – not noticing that Masha sneaks in late on. When he awakens Anna is no longer sleeping on the couch, but then he sees that she is looking through his rare books. She seems knowledgeable but is about to leave when a woman comes to the door to ask Sasha’s advice on a book she wishes to sell. Anna spots things about the book that he missed and he asks her to become his assistant.

Sasha

So Masha leaves to go on the arranged visit with her mother and Sasha and Anna draw closer, with her helping with a book he started writing but abandoned, helping him develop a female voice for his character. They fall for each other and what I wasn’t so sure of is whether, when Masha arrives home, they are planning to marry (as the subtitles suggest) or are married as later is the case (though we see no wedding). We do hear, from the doctor, that love agrees with Sasha and he seems to have shrugged ailments away. We also get the fact that Masha is not happy communicated loudly and clearly, and here we have one of the issues with the film.

draining the assassin

She talks to a friend who listens to her thoughts on poisoning Anna and then casually offers to get her access to a hitman (this is after using 'sources' to discover that Anna's passport is false and her name belongs to a dead woman). Now, whilst her friend is drawn as rich, the number of teenage girls who have access to investigative resources and hitmen would be very few and far between one feels. The fact that Masha steals a rare book and sells it to her father’s friend also seemed a wee bit contrived. Anna is stabbed by the hitman, gets up, kisses him and he dies. The cops then coming round (as he died near their house), when there are no marks on his body and, therefore, it wouldn’t imply foul play, is also odd. The fact that Anna covers for Masha about her knowledge of the man, and they therefore bond, is terribly shorthand.

Anna stabbed

We discover more about Anna through Sasha’s friend who has spotted her unusual signet ring and discovers it is the sign of a secret society of female immortals. They have learnt to devour life energy and are not allowed romantic relationships with men (as they cannot help but pass energy to the man, hence Sasha’s ailments going away) except to breed. If they have a boy it is fostered, if female they raise her – conducting a ritual at their birth where they devour all the father’s life energy and pass it to the baby – Anna is pregnant and, after appearing on TV, her family come looking for her. Sasha’s friend not only discovers these facts but finds various random photos/news articles about Anna (including a picture from Woodstock) and again this is contrived.

Anna with her mother

That is the story of the film, contrived moments to drive the plot forward. Although it is very well photographed the film does not know whether it wants to be a thriller (as I implied above, it manages to eschew anything resembling horror) or a Hallmark style romance with a supernatural background. The relationship just appears, without enough build, the reconciliation between daughter and step-mother is so contrived it makes the teeth ache with saccharine sweetness (despite it all being around attempted murder). The feeding method is gore free and, indeed, leaves behind a pristine corpse. An angry psychic lashing out can lead to the target having a nose bleed. The Hallmark nature probably means that a reading of misogyny into this was unconsciously included, visible through the depiction of a threatening female society who are depicted as ruthlessly evil, bar the one who, through the love of a man, becomes good and domesticated - within a patriarchal view that domesticity equals being the house keeper.

Anna does drink... wine...

That said, despite this, I don’t want to score it too low. Anna and Sasha were both played naturally and the actors did their best with the contrived material. Anna’s Aunt (when we meet her) was a terribly under-used character who was madcap and sinister rolled into one – though the rest of the family were non-descript (bar the ‘sister’ with a severe haircut, who caricatured a stern character). 4 out of 10 suggests that it was more entertaining than it should have been.

The imdb page is here.

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On Demand @ Amazon UK