November is a 2018 fantasy about magic, black humor and romantic love with werewolves, the plague, and spirits.
It’s not a stretch to call Rainer Sarnet‘s latest fairytale a little hard to access. It’s often a disorienting, allegorical, visually distressing parable that will leave your head spinning. It’s a love story at heart, a troubling one that has hints of the familiar though there is nothing conventional about it. Deeply embedded in fantastical lore, it’s a fascinating and profoundly engaging experience unlike anything you will likely ever see. Mostly, it’s trippy as hell.
In a small Estonian village, set in the early 19th century, we meet a young, pretty peasant woman named Liina (Rea Lest), who lives with her craggy, pitiless father in a ramshackle farm near the woods. With them is a ‘kratt’, a sentient creature made of bits of old tools, straw, and an animal skull, it possessed with a soul given by the devil, at a deep price. It’s a simple beast demanding to perform menial tasks. Liina is desperately in love with Hans (Jörgen Liik), a peasant who is in turn smitten with the nearby wealthy Baron’s daughter. Amid this, Liina’s father has promised her to a much older man even as Liina’s mother, who is a ghost, does not think the match is right. Meanwhile, the locals collect church wafers as bullets and a werewolf roams the forests.
Based on Andrus Kivirähk‘s 2000 book Rehepapp ehk November, Sarnet looks to capture the ebony black comedy and satire of the novel, creating a wildly unsettling film seeped with Estonian culture and legend, including the kratt, which once imbibed with a soul, must continue to work or else turn against its master, though when given a job impossible to perform, well, it’s a sight. These ungainly, spindly, creaking creatures are but a small part of the weirdness where we witness increasingly bizarre and curious imagery that is often as disturbing as it is breathtaking.
Naturally, religion and faith are entrenched in the narrative, the people devoutely Christian but resigned to a pact with the devil where deals are struck to maintain their kratts and perhaps, simply survive in times of great strife. A plague has come to them, she in the shape of a beautifully deceivious woman with a second, truer form. And then there is the werewolf, whose identity I won’t spoil, a beast whose presence is felt throughout.
November is not an easy film to take in. It pushes boundaries and is uncompromising in its commitment to the bizarre, those who study Estonian mythology most assuredly having an advantage. There isn’t a lot of dialogue, Sarnet richly threading together a stunning tapestry of undeniably compelling visuals, all in black & white. For fans of Robert Eggers‘s The Witch, it will certainly have appeal, though veers away from horror in favor of the strange. To be sure, it’s an often arresting experience.
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November invites exploration of course, where the gaps in rich and poor are seen in cuts between a lavish yet unwelcoming mansion and a patched together hut barely big enough to stand up in. The locals are layered in dirt, their wide smiles lacking teeth, the rich adorned in opulence but never happy. It also speaks of love and lust, history and passions, hopes and despair. It bends funny into touching, as in the tale of a kratt snowman with a story being far more than it seems. Yes, November is a challenge, one that perhaps the casual film fan might find a leap too far to take, but is nonetheless a monumental achievement in visual storytelling, a daring, deranged bit of madness that will undoubtedly shake you.
November opens theatrically in New York City on February 23rd, and in Los Angeles on March 2nd.