Dea Kulumbegashvili is the much-admired Georgian director whose feature debut, Beginning, won golden opinions, though I confess to having been agnostic on the grounds of mannerisms that were a little derivative – some resemblances there to Carlos Reygadas and Michael Haneke.
Her follow-up movie, April, is now presented at Venice. That month has never seemed crueller. The high arthouse influences are still detectable, but Kulumbegashvili has mastered and absorbed them and has an evolving film-language of her own, though still involving extended static takes, long shots in which people have inaudible but important conversations in the far distance, and explicit moments of violence whose shock is tempered and complicated by strangely exalted, if bizarre, visionary sequences.
