Silent Souls

A mystical masterpiece about a lonely man who helps a widower perform last rites for his wife, is an astonishing, haunting, sensual, lyrical, bleak and ultimately beautiful road-trip movie.

Silent Souls is a marvel. Fedorchenko's expressive powers and his visual prowess are astonishing, and though the film's conclusion is abrupt and confounding, it feels right.

Rife with earthy details and poetic associations, the movie often advances like a daydream.

Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.

Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.

At a little over an hour, Silent Souls is hardly long, yet the camera's repeated focus on the wintry, gray country road they're traveling can feel somewhat ponderous -- like life itself, as one of the guys in the film might wryly point out.

Beautifully assembled, but emotionally inert despite its focus on bereavement and love's endurance, Russian art film Silent Souls reps at the very least a significant step up for its helmer, Aleksei Fedorchenko.