Film Review: NIKA: A Poetic Prodigy’s Final Days Turned Into Competently Commonplace Drama [SXSW 2022]

Nika Review

Nika (2022) Film Review from the 29th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Vasilisa Kuzmina, starring Elizaveta Yankovskaya, Anna Mikhalkova, Ivan Fominov, Vitaliya Korniyenko, and Evgeniy Sangadzhiev.

Opening with a disclaimer that reiterates the filmmaker-audience contract of creative liberties and suspension of disbelief, Nika reminds us that this is ultimately a work of fiction rather than a true historical document. You’d think such a statement would precede an audacious reinterpretation of the last days of the Soviet poetic prodigy, and while there are some bits of melodramatic excess that then unfurl, Vasilisa Kuzmina’s new biopic operates in an otherwise by-the-numbers fashion.

Set at the turn of the millennium in the suburbs of Moscow, the late-20s Nika Turbina (Elizaveta Yankovskaya) whittles her days away as a smoke-shrouded wallflower. She hasn’t produced new poetry in over a decade yet her world-class renown still follows her around like a ghost (though not so much the financial success of it). Desperate to escape the pressure of public expectations, as well as the whispered-about past hardships that she experienced with her mother (Anna Mikhalkova), Nika wafts into and out of various social functions attempting to numb and distort her inner torment.

Nika is worth watching solely for Yankovskaya’s performance in the titular role. Her portrayal of a manipulated artist and an exploited woman who is pushed right up to her breaking point is incredibly restrained and ragefully ecstatic. It accentuates the aims of Kuzmina and Yulia Gulyan’s script, wherein we feel Nika’s frustrations as but one example of how society thrusts women into roles and expectations which they never agreed to take on (not to mention the cringey discomfort that comes by design when they refuse to comply). Yankovskaya conveys this psychological prison of the late poet with furious tenacity: a pent-up combination of anger, sorrow, and regret, all of which propel the film along its burnt-out-artist narrative.

But that’s just it: Yankovskaya’s performance is but a piece of a larger work, and that work has a disappointingly familiar cadence to it.

Nika desperately wants true independence from her mother, who she’s long suspected of manipulating her for financial and social gain. Unfortunately, with no income except that from her mother’s movie poster painting business, Nika remains trapped in their shared one-bedroom apartment. She desperately wants to reinvent her image, although that’s difficult to do when everyone expects life-changing poetry to keep springing from her head.  Even her on-again-off-again boyfriend (Ivan Fominov) is guilty of demanding too much from her, and Nika finds herself starved for artistic and personal autonomy. When an attempt to reinvent herself as an actress embarrassingly falls through Nika’s mental health rapidly deteriorates, and she soon finds herself returning to the psych ward, a childhood mainstay, fighting for any semblance of stability.

Once again, Yankovskaya delivers a powerhouse performance as she rockets from one emotional extreme to the next, but it feels in service of a story that’s all too well-trodded and glib. Kuzmina plays around with some clever editing choices in the final thirty minutes that emphasize Nika’s loosening grip on reality, but it feels either too-little-too-late in terms of stylistic experimentation and/or a shallow take on topics of unchecked mental health and burnout. (Not to mention that that’s when you realize her mother has been painting movie posters for films about unreliable narrators, distorted truths, and stories told from the point of view of a deceased child, it feels like a crude easter egg more than a clever parallel.)

In essence, Nika is held back by its own turning point. Does it want to be a down-to-earth tragedy about the eventual demise of a troubled woman? Because the more experimental last half-hour seems to cheapen that sentiment. Does it want to be a dramatized reimagination of the end of the poet’s life? Because it sure doesn’t feel like that until it’s almost over. Kuzmina seems to be striving for something extraordinary, something worthy of the late poet’s reputation, but a conflict of stylistic interest turns it into a commonplace (though competent) tale of struggle.

The ironic thing is that Kuzmina portrays the real Nika Turbina as striving for a commonplace and competent life throughout her final days. It’s difficult to determine whether she actually achieved it in her own cinematic eulogy.

Rating: 6/10

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