Night Watch (2004)

Night Watch arrives from Moscow with the confidence of a film that has seen The Matrix and Blade and decided it can manage both at once, on a fraction of the budget, with subtitles that occasionally bleed across the screen like an unwell screensaver. Timur Bekmambetov's 2004 adaptation of Sergei Lukyanenko's novel concerns a truce between the forces of Light and Dark, policed by two bureaucratic agencies that mostly stand in stairwells looking aggrieved. It is a supernatural procedural. The vampires are pale, the witches are cranky, and the apocalypse is scheduled for a Tuesday.

The film does not lecture. That absence is the most striking thing about it, because a genre picture of comparable scale made today would arrive with a moral attached, likely several. Here we get a prophecy, a cursed nurse, a boy who turns out to be somebody's son, and a great deal of running through Moscow in the rain. The cast is uniformly Russian, which is to say it reflects its setting without appearing to have consulted a spreadsheet. Women appear as witches and operatives and are given no speech about their condition. Nobody announces an identity. Nobody mentions the climate. The conflict is between good and evil, an arrangement older than the multiplex and unburdened by any thesis about contemporary society.

The film is muddled, overstuffed, and occasionally thrilling, and it wants nothing from us but our attention. That is a modest request, and it is mostly honored. Bekmambetov directs like a man with something to prove, which he did, since this was the first big-budget Russian supernatural blockbuster produced after the Soviet film industry collapsed. It became the highest-grossing Russian release ever, outearning The Fellowship of the Ring on its home turf. A sequel followed. None of this required a message, and none was supplied.