Radik Eshimov’s Burning, which I fondly refer to as Late Night with the Rashomon, is a staggering, heartbreaking achievement. Eshimov’s Kyrgyzstani saga, which is having its North American premiere at this year’s Fantasia Festival, endeavors to unpack dense societal and cultural constraints within the context of a single house fire. As neighbors gather at a nearby convenience store to discuss the unfolding disaster, rumor swirls. Who started it? More importantly, why that home? Why that family?
If Aizada Bekbalaeva and Dastan Madaldiev’s script has a fault, it’s largely the limitations and profound subjectivity of Burning’s peripheral points of view. Where Rashomon’s surrogate accounts via woodcutter, priest, and commoner are augmented by more directly involved parties, Burning defies its own logic, with tales spun from rumor that nonetheless yield, presumably, indisputible truths.
Conventionally, the three-act structure allows for dovetailing accounts to culminate in, if not the truth, the closest thing to it. The fire’s three participants, mother-in-law, Farida (Kalicha Seydalieva), and grieving couple Asel (Aysanat Edigeeva) and Marat (Ömürbek Izrailov), lead respective vignettes titled Guilt, Excuse, and The Reason, and each, in true Rashomon fashion, details the same experience from wildly different perspectives.
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As always, the narrative and thematic goal is to distill truth from wildly unreliable proxies. Is Farida secretly a witch, practicing black magic at the expense of her daughter-in-law in a Rosemary’s Baby riff? Or, conversely, were such rituals intended to be analeptic? Is Farida perhaps possessed by a jinn?
Every possible angle is explored, all connected by a single, undisputed truth—the fire was lit long before. The dissolution and disaster were only a matter of time. Eshimov wisely approaches each vignette as a horror subgenre unto itself. The first plays with paranoid domestic fantasies, serving up dollops of disgusting (truly) body horror, while the second perspective mines from the possessive well of titles like The Exorcist. It diversifies the scares without ever undermining the core conceit.
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The indelible genre structure and dabbling in familiar tropes pulverize expectations. It’s expected, though no less intoxicating, to see alliances and sympathies shift as three disparate parts of the same tragedy are pieced together into the closest thing to a cohesive whole. Which, largely, is the point. A devastating dénouement suggests the truth might not even matter all that much. With the pain and suffering of the family nothing but a pile of cinders, dissecting the who and what, and more importantly, why of it all makes no difference. Our fears, the true horrors of the world, do enough damage without the help of folkloric beings or sinister matriarchal figures.
Burning is an accomplishment. This is heavy, heady genre work that culls from the genre’s past to spotlight damning, distinctly contemporary fears. In a lot of ways, Burning is a monster movie. The question is: which monster should we be most afraid of?
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