Loveless is “two hours of gorgeously gloomy existential despair courtesy of the well-regarded Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Often touted as an heir to Tarkovsky, Russian cinema’s other famously austere Andrey, Zvyagintsev previously competed at Cannes with Leviathan (2014), which won the jury’s screenwriting award and went on to score an Oscar nomination for foreign-language film. Like that earlier film, Loveless is a shatteringly bleak family drama that expands into a corrosive critique of its country’s social, political and spiritual ills.”
At the Playlist, Jessica Kiang “expected his bitterness, his allegorically politicized critique of Russian society, its corruption and cruelty. But nothing could have truly prepared us for the apocalyptic despair of Loveless, perhaps his most brilliant, but also most profoundly pessimistic film to date that, couched in such viscerally intelligent, skillful filmmaking, may also be his most persuasive.”
“Boris (Alexei Rozin), bearded and officious, a kind of mildly saddened Teddy bear, and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), beautiful and knife-edged, with a buried despair of her own, still live together in the same apartment,” explains Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “Their marriage, or what’s left of it, has reached the toxic point of no return. No one understands this better than Alyosha (Matvey Novikov), their pale and passive 12-year-old son, who doesn’t do much besides stare at his computer between crying fits. When Alyosha disappears without a trace, his emotionally estranged parents have to come together to search for him. But no, Loveless isn’t a story about how the search for Alyosha brings Boris and Zhenya closer together. . . What the movie is about, in a way that’s both potent and oblique, is something larger than the charred ashes of one dead marriage.”
“As the hunt for Alyosha broadens out, so too do its implications,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. “As is the way with Zvyagintsev’s work. . . the small story at hand offers an opaque but pitiless critique on the director’s native Russia at large. A radio news program warns of an increase in ‘apocalyptic sentiments’ among the population, while deep divisions in society—financial, geographical, generational—all play their part in stymieing the search.”
“Loveless reminded me of the same director’s Elena,” notes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “and it also has the unflinching moral seriousness of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. The story of a disappearance which betokens some larger, metaphysical dysfunction has something of Antonioni’s L’Avventura—a film whose importance and example continues unabated—and the single, static shot of a school about to let the pupils out may have taken something else from that other touchstone: Michael Haneke’s Hidden. The grim presence in this film of elderly mothers—secular Buddhas of reactionary cynicism who show every sign of inducing their children to become their duplicate—reminded me of Philip Larkin’s lines about man handing on misery to man and it deepening like a coastal shelf.”
“All of this might register as an overdose of fatalism if Spivak and Rosin didn’t deliver such absorbing, fragile performances that veer from dramatic outbursts to quiet, introverted glares,” writes IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “Ultimately, though, Loveless belongs to Zyvagintsev’s own startling formalism.”
“Collaborating once again with several of his favorite below-the-line craftspeople, including editor Anna Mass, production designer Andrey Ponkratov and DP and MVP Mikhail Krichman, a cinematographer who never met a rain-flecked window he didn’t love, Zvyagintsev maintains the exacting technical standards for which he’s known,” adds Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter.
More from Dan Fainaru (Screen), Fabien Lemercier (Cineuropa), and Barbara Scharres (RogerEbert.com), and, in Spanish, Mónica Delgado (desistfilm) and Diego Lerer. Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. reports that Sony Pictures Classics has picked up all North and Latin American rights.
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