'Zemun' is the debut film by Eduard Zholnin, produced by Alexei Uchitel with Evgeny Tkachuk in the lead role. In our review—about why all these people failed to revive the Eastern genre.

Auto mechanic Yegor (Evgeny Tkachuk) is fired from his job, and that same night his brother Pasha (Ivan Reshetnyak) calls him, asking him to return to their native village for the funeral of their father, who died under mysterious circumstances.

Almost nothing has changed in the village, except the houses are a bit more dilapidated, people drink a little more, and an unfamiliar boy is now herding their father's herd of cows. Yegor goes to the cemetery to talk to his younger brother—a good-natured shepherd—and convince him to return to the city.

Pasha doesn't want to—here there are cows, stability, hopes, and dreams. Yegor tries to persuade the country bumpkin but runs up against his brother's love for cows. Yegor himself loves no one, and slightly more than others—the cows themselves (one of them, the mythical cow Zemun, a guide for shepherds to the afterlife—keeps appearing to him, for some reason).

What unfolds next is something like a classic neo-Western, adjusted for these latitudes—the meridian is just as bloody, but the pipe is lower, the smoke thinner, and instead of horses, there are cows. The brothers quarrel, but eventually realize their main enemy is a gangster-like businessman Gleb (Oleg Yagodin), who initially seems to want money from the cow slaughter but actually aims to get the nickel-rich land—Yegor and Pasha's plot—for a pittance.

In principle, this is called an Eastern (Eastern-themed Western), and 'Zemun' can be used to measure the pulse of this dying genre. Once, its greatest master was Nikita Mikhalkov, but since the Eastern is a freedom-loving cinema, when Nikita Sergeevich became a 'Besogon' (a zealot) and expelled the chief demon—freedom—from himself, the place of the singer of highland plains remained, in a sense, vacant. In short, it remains so.

Not that 'Zemun' is bad, not at all; it's just that, like the main character (not the most eloquent young man), the film's director Eduard Zholnin cannot properly express his thoughts—he consistently makes all the mistakes of a debutant and, trying to say everything at once, at some point seems to moo slightly.

Here again is the usual set of dichotomies for Russian indie cinema—village/city, noble poverty/vicious wealth, natural god/capitalist devil—and the somewhat sentimental Zholnin even adds the theme of family, apparently just to be sure, so that the motorcycle chase that occurs at one point no longer resembles the dashing pursuits of Westerns but the good old 'Fast & Furious' film.

In the end, it turns out to be a kind of parable, in many ways—despite the pagan cow (Zemun)—biblical, only Cain and Abel don't have time to play their roles here—to become murderer and victim—because wherever God doesn't intervene, capitalism does, meaning everyone will ultimately become victims. And they do, naturally, but at some point, the viewer risks becoming a victim in this whole story—honestly, if only once we could have a genre film without a Deep Philosophical Idea and without the chthonic so beloved by many.

And there's plenty of it in 'Zemun'—the released auto mechanic constantly sees, we recall, a large white cow in the fog (in these moments, only the caption from the 'why' meme is missing), a mute girl with a special connection to nature herds the cattle (it might, by the way, seem like a reference to one of the best episodes of 'Firefly'), and old woman Varvara constantly mutters dark legends.

Since it's obvious there's not enough creepiness in the film, they added Vlas to the plot—a mix of Balabanov's holy fool and a Native American—who herds the cow cemetery and talks like a tipsy Master Yoda (and also eats dirt, which is obviously symbolic but still over the top). Up to a certain point, all this builds the atmosphere, but then it becomes somewhat comical, and the cow meme comes to mind again.

Eduard Zholnin is undoubtedly a talented debutant, and his seven-year odyssey of searching for a story, producers, and a team makes one look at the resulting film with some warmth and look forward to the next project of this interesting author. But at the same time, the film cannot be called an unequivocally successful experience: too much is mixed in here, especially things that Balabanov had already mixed in more successful proportions. And 'Zemun,' with its seemingly deep subtext that sometimes resembles excerpts from a school social studies textbook, is precisely something in between Balabanov and Sheridan (less 'Yellowstone,' more 'Wind River,' only Tkachuk is, generally speaking, no Jeremy Renner), a Sundance film, and a funereal parable about earth spirits. But precisely something in between. It's actually even a shame.