Siberia (2018)

Siberia opens with Keanu Reeves in a fur-lined coat, squinting at the horizon of a mining town that has clearly seen better decades. He plays Lucas Hill, a diamond merchant whose business partner has vanished along with a pouch of rare blue stones. The plot drags him through Saint Petersburg and the Siberian interior, where every conversation is a threat and every woman is property. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It simply watches men behave badly in cold rooms.

The centerpiece is a ritual of brotherhood in which two gangsters require their women to service the opposing party as a gesture of good faith. Katya, played by Ana Ularu, is given a moment of defiance, but the scene exists to demonstrate the depth of her captivity, not to critique it. The camera observes. The plot continues. Lucas cheats on his wife, lies to federal agents, and dies face down in the snow for his trouble. Nobody learns. Nobody grows. The moral universe of the picture is a closed and airless room.

We searched this film for a thesis about representation, about gender, about the extraction economy that hollows out the town. We found none. The Russian cast plays Russian characters because the story is set in Russia. The diamonds are a McGuffin and not a metaphor for late capitalism. The environment is weather, not a warning. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no invitation to feel righteous about anything. It is a grubby, fatalistic genre exercise, and it achieves a kind of purity in its refusal to mean anything at all.