Myortvye docheri

Just amazing. It had all signs of at least good movie three months before started in theaters. Great previews, internet rumors, exiting director's comments with a bunch of impressive trailers and pictures. And finally- zero. Pretentious set of clichés, banality and bore. Probably, it's the worst Russian film I've seen for months. Authors of "The Blair Witch Project" successfully created faked horror documentary. I prefer Ruminov would do the next step and never show his "DD" anywhere. At least in this case with all the fusses and the buzzes around it could be the first great horror movie that nobody have ever seen. Very disappointing. 1/10

This ain't you typical horror flick, although director Pavel Ruminov makes you think the opposite for the first ten minutes or so. It soon gets obvious that this film is much more sophisticated and thought-provoking than The Ring and other Japanese horror remakes/originals. The whole "ghosts of drowned girls seeking revenge on humankind" premise serves as a backdrop to an eclectic thriller that's rich in social satire, extremely dense in visual detail and is way closer to an existential drama than any other "horror" movie out there. Basically it appeared to be sort of a shock therapy for the Russian audiences. Most of the moviegoers expected to see another quality adaptation of an old Japanese concept, but instead were bombarded with a chain of disturbing and highly involving events that made the viewing experience very personal, intimate, and, it appears, in many cases quite unpleasant. As for me, I had no problems with this film whatsoever, probably because I was already familiar with Ruminov's style of movie-making and actually expected much more than a typical ghost movie.

Well done camera work - sometimes a bit shaky but for those who watched Lars von Triers movies this is nothing :). Beautiful film. The plot is typical for horror genre, but with a Russian (Dostoevsky type) twist - the monsters don't kill "just because" but for not being "good" - giving you a chance to think about what is good and bad. Sometimes it's not so obvious. Acting could be better but generally it is a well done entertaining movie with good suspense. For reasons not clear, some Russian reviewers got so disgusted with the movie (see the 'valektburg' comment) that I honestly thought it must be personal. The film didn't deserve this kind of reviews.

Ruminov had a billion interviews to Russian tabloids, TV etc, everyone expected something really spectacular, break-through for Russian cinema, he has got very positive critics in advance. Now we've got these 123 minutes of (trendy?) trembling camera, awful dialogues, weird cut and lost story. Attempt of making youth movie, voice of a generation is totally crashed. Too formal, no atmosphere, no horror spirit, no distinct story, - just video and audio sfx. The directors who came from advertising are always experiencing the same problem - but Ruminov told too much about the new level cinematography in Russia, and cannot be excused. It could be just a debut of nephew, but he pretended he was very experienced and smart, so we just can see the evidence of real arrogance, but not the movie.

Complete waste of time, don't watch. Pretentious script, shocky camera work that is supposed to give this movie an artsy edge but only makes you wish for the movie to end. I don't know know this director but I hope he found a better suited job and doesn't direct more "artworks"