Sasha (Tkachenko) is a man cursed with an overwhelming power, one that has controlled and dominated his life far more than he has ever controlled it, one that has set him apart from society and made him an outcast since childhood leaving him an angry man prone to lashing out with violence. Hoping to find some peace with himself Sasha returns to his home town where, far from being welcomed, an encounter with a lover from his younger days leaves him beaten and bloody in the middle of the street, a beating he repays later that night with a metal pipe leaving his assailant in the hospital and Sasha himself on the run from both police and a high ranking Russian mafioso.

It is clear here, right from the very beginning, that Sasha is not a good man. He has horrible violence in his past, in his present, and by all indications in his future as well. He is ruthless and cold blooded and will exact horrible retribution against any who draw his anger. In any other film, in any other world, Sasha would be the villain of the piece, not the hero, but Yankovskiy's film is set in a slowly decaying Russia where everyone is on the take, everyone is corrupt, everyone is dangerous and untrustworthy and any sort of purity of intent immediately elevates you above the masses no matter how broken and violent you may be otherwise. For Sasha that purity comes in the form of Katya, a woman he meets totally at random and falls powerfully and immediately in love with. It is a romance doomed from the start and Sasha knows it: he knows what he is and what lies in his future, but for at least a brief moment he can imagine and reach for something better in his life. It all, of course, ends in tragedy.

The Sword Bearer plays more like memory than conscious narrative, the story stripped to its absolute bare essentials and presented as a series of key moments, encounters and desires. Yankovskiy certainly gives you enough to put the narrative together but he absolutely never tells you what he can show you, always opts to make you feel rather than think or understand. He wants you simply to feel as Sasha feels and strips away everything that may distract from that, keeping dialogue to an absolute minimum. The plot line is present, yes, and drives constantly forward but Yankovskiy is far more interested in who Sasha is and what he feels than with what Sasha does and so the film spends far more time with the quiet moments on the side - the glances and raw impulses, the bits that are easily overlooked taken individually but combine as a whole to make us who we are - than it does taking us to the next action sequence.

Which is not, of course, to say that those sequences are not there. We see Sasha in action and we see it often. What it does mean is that Yankovskiy always keeps the action element of the film in service to the character work. Every time we see Sasha use his power it tells us more about him, we see another piece of him fall into place and we gradually see him change. The film excercises enormous restraint in the early going, keeping the violence implied and off screen, showing the aftermath if anything, then gradually becoming more and more explicit to match Sasha's gradually rising sense of desperation - this is a man who has likely never had anything he valued enough to fear losing before in his life - so that when the end finally comes and we witness Sasha flailing about in raw desperation, blindly expending his full force in a final hopeless attempt to defend Katya from the consequences of being associated with him, it packs as much an emotional force as physical.

As sparse and spare a script as this is uttely reliant on quality performances and a skilled hand behind the camera if it is to succeed and The Sword Bearer has both. Yankovskiy has a stunning eye, the film filled with a stream of incredibly images of a society in decay, architecture and landscapes both seemingly crumbling away into nothing. The film is shot through an amber filter with the color values just slightly oversaturated giving everything a feeling both slightly surreal and nostalgic. The scripting feels like wistful memory and the visuals more than match. And, as stated earlier, both Tkachenko and Khamatova are very strong in the leads, both giving their characters believable depth and a compelling sort of soulfulness despite the script giving minimal back story for Sasha - this aint no origin story, there's no hint at all as to where his powers came from - and none whatsoever for Katya.

The Sword Bearer is likely going to have a rather difficult time finding an audience. It is too thoughtful by far to draw the teen crowd that normally goes for this sort of thing, about as far from the Hollywood whiz-bang approach to this type of material as is humanly possible. It is also, however, incredibly violent for the art house set, featuring graphic amputations and eviscerations. It doesn't really fit neatly into either world, taking elements it likes from both and reshaping them into something remarkable and unusual, categories that often lead, unfortunately, to financial failure. But whatever it may be, whether it find a mass audience or not, this is a compelling piece of work that marks Yankovskiy as a major talent.

The film is now available in a pair of Russian editions, a standard single disc and a two disc set that includes the soundtrack CD. Despite packaging that says otherwise the transfer is anamorphic widescreen and quite strong. Audio quality is good and the optional English subtitles are excellent. Though I am still just beginning to dip my toe into the Russian DVD market I am already realizing that Vox Video - the DVD company behind these releases - is one of the good ones, their releases always featuring strong translations and typically very strong transfers. This comes very highly recommended.