Beginning

An often astonishingly tedious endeavor, Beginning follows Ia Sukhitashvili’s Yana as she undergoes a crisis of identity after her church is the target of a deadly attack. The degree to which Beginning ultimately alienates the viewer is rather distressing, to say the least, as filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili kicks the proceedings off with an absolutely incredible opening shot that seems to promise a deliberate yet enthralling drama. It’s not long, however, before the picture segues into a mostly interminable midsection devoid of three-dimensional characters or even the simplest, most basic instances of exposition, as Kulumbegashvili, working from a script written with Rati Oneli, instead delivers a series of static shots that transpire without explanation or context. (There is, for example, a shot of Yana napping in the woods that lasts an infuriatingly full five minutes.) Kulumbegashvili’s refusal to provide answers to any of the many questions raised by her abstract narrative grows more and more frustrating, to put it mildly, and the aggressively meandering nature of the endless third act ensures that Beginning concludes on as underwhelming and pointless a note as one could possibly envision – which firmly and completely cements the movie’s place as a self-indulgent mess of epic proportions.

1/2* out of ****