In her assiduously unusual second feature film, writer/director Alena Lodkina seems to consider “genre” to be a kind of bait, one that she refuses to take. In Petrol she crafts an experience that’s difficult to categorise and often tough to enjoy, but captivating in subtle ways. Lodkina has a way of staging an apparently normal scene, then making you think “huh?” at the end. One trick she uses is inserting images associated with horror, stripped of aesthetic and context – there’s no blast of nerve-jangling music proclaiming the arrival of a spooky visual, for instance, and no narrative template clearly signposting where she is taking us.
