Siberia Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Siberia Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 21, 2021

Years ago, when Rod Serling’s venerable The Twilight Zone was rebooted for the first (but far from the last) time, there was a really fascinating episode detailing the story of an increasingly confused man who was astounded that language was slowly morphing around him, to the point that he ended the tale as a virtual child again, looking at primers to try to figure out what various words meant. The feeling of isolation and discombobulation was virtually palpable, but it may very well pale in comparison to the underlying dissociation at play in Siberia, the latest collaboration between star Willem Dafoe and co-writer and director Abel Ferrara. That may be because the lack of a “common language” is just one of several hurdles keeping focal character Clint (Dafoe) from interacting with people, since Clint is a rather addled sort who may have surrendered to various figments of his imagination. Any film which includes a (dead) fish speaking Russian might seem to be willfully audacious with a standard closing copyright disclaimer alerting people to the fact that characters bearing any similarity to real, live humans (and/or creatures) is a purely coincidental circumstance, but this being an Abel Ferrara film, aspects like that might be a reasonable expectation.

One of the few seemingly rational moments in Siberia occurs right at the get go, as Clint narrates a tale under the credits of some long ago "male bonding" with his father and older brother on a fishing expedition out in the wild where there were also Cree indigenous people. But as soon as the actual imagery starts, things become decidedly more surreal. The first sequence in the film seems to be at least relatively normal, with an Inuit man arriving at Clint's desolate watering hole out in the frozen tundra. Though Clint is not at all fluent in the man's native language (a situation which recurs with other visitors), the two manage to understand each other, resulting in Clint providing the guy with a drink. But then a sidebar involving a dog barking outside and Clint going to feed it just kind of erupts out nowhere, and which suggests at least subliminally that there is either a parallel timeline unfolding or some kind of editing trickery, based on the fact that Clint is wearing different clothing in the two intercut scenes.

Just a few minutes later, something a bit analogous occurs when Clint is involved with another customer, this one a guy who rather uncharacteristically speaks English and who is playing a video slot machine that is rather improbably part of Clint's establishment. The two are discussing the pluses and minuses of gambling when once again out of nowhere suddenly Clint seems to be getting rather viciously attacked by a possibly rabid dog. It's all obviously deliberately disjunctive, but these are just two of the first examples of Siberia's often very strange structure and presentational aspects, so that anyone coming to this film expecting a more or less straightforward narrative had best be disabused of that notion as soon as possible.

There is a virtually nonstop array of weird vignettes populating Siberia, including the arrival of a Russian pair of women at Clint's place of business, one of whom is extremely pregnant with what is at least hinted is Clint's child. Later, there is some explicatory material detailing more of Clint's romantic history (not necessarily limited to the Russian woman), but it's doled out in intentionally fitful dribs and drabs and often mixed with what might be termed a liberal dose of magical realist imagery. Plot elements like Clint actually (if anything in Siberia can be taken at face value) entering a cave to explore the reaches of his subconscious seem either willfully "on the nose" or quite possibly overly pretentious.

The nooks and crannies of Clint's addled psyche are filled with a phantasmagoria of people, some seemingly more "realistic" than others. He has an interchange with everyone from his father, who is kind of comically wearing shaving cream, to a naked dwarf woman who is in a wheelchair. There are other, more demonic, characters lurking in the background, and one very odd scene includes a bunch of naked or near naked people begging for doctors, with one man seemingly having suffered a rather gruesome injury to his groin. Nightmare visions like this are counterweighted with almost Terence Malick-ian moments of metaphysical imagery, often with Clint talking to various versions of himself.

And so most viewers, or at least those who share my own frequent sense of discombobulation, are going to be left with the central question: what does it all mean? I'm frankly not sure even Ferrara might be able to convincingly answer that question, since Siberia, as audacious at it most certainly is, does not seem to want to provide any "meaning" in the conventional sense, instead offering what amounts to a doctoral thesis in montage theory in service of a "story" about mental dissolution. By the time the film ends with that aforementioned dead fish speaking in Russian, some may feel they've joined Clint in his own personal asylum.

Siberia Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Siberia is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. I haven't been able to dredge up any authoritative technical data on the shoot or DI, but the film's cinematographer was the lauded Stefano Felivene, and one of Siberia's definite strengths is its often arresting imagery. Felivene and Ferrara utilize all sorts of bells and whistles, including everything from split diopters to wide angle lenses to a variety of sometimes very striking grading choices, all of which give Siberia a very distinctive appearance. As can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review, the "far north" sequences are often skewed toward an almost teal blue-green color, while other sequences, including a desert scene and a brief vignette between Clint and his wife (?) are almost jaundiced looking, with a prevalence of yellow toning suffusing the frame. While detail levels are generally very good throughout the presentation, the incessant darkness of so much of the imagery just doesn't always allow for much in the way of fine detail, and some of the most dimly lit material can be quite hard to make out at times.

Siberia Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Siberia benefits from a very effective sound design as well, and this Blu-ray disc's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track offers some well wrought immersion and a variety of sometimes spooky placement of various ambient environmental sounds. There's inviting directionality at times, as in the distant barking of the dog in the film's opening moments, and there are also sudden bursts of activity, as in the subsequent dog attack seen very briefly for a moment. More nightmarish moments, including some of the cave material, have a weird dichotomy between sounding both claustrophobic and kind of overly echo laden and reverberant, giving everything even more of a surreal quality. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly, though Ferrara chooses not to subtitle any of the foreign languages, leaving the viewer in the same confused boat as Clint. There are optional English and Spanish subtitles for the English language dialogue.

Siberia Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (HD; 2:02)

Siberia Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I kept waiting for some kind of Jacob's Ladder payoff to all of the madness Clint experiences, and if there are hints of something like that, Ferrara chooses to leave things mystifyingly ambiguous. This is a showcase for Dafoe, and fans of the actor may well want to check this out since he is on screen virtually the entire running time, often by himself (or at most with other "versions" of himself). Technical merits, especially the very effective audio, are solid, for those considering a purchase.