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Germany, Italy · 2020
1h 32m
Director Abel Ferrara
Starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Cristina Chiriac
Genre Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
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A visionary glimpse into the life of Clint, a tormented man who has retired to an isolated shack in the ice. One evening, with his sled and his dogs, he sets out on a journey into the world he once knew, in an attempt to face himself and rediscover serenity.
It is a work that is impossible to forget, impossible to stop thinking about, and is one of the most genuine portraits of isolation and depression in recent film history. After all, sometimes we’ve all felt like there’s nothing left but darkness.
Abel Ferrara doesn’t require traditional dream logic, as his grasp of the nitty-gritty quotidian of longing is inherently uncanny.
For all of Ferrara’s reckless abandon — and Dafoe’s unimpeachable commitment to artistic exploration — Siberia becomes increasingly unable to instigate our own journeys of the soul; seldom has the collective unconscious felt so inaccessible.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
In the end, there is a method in all this madness, suggested by Dafoe’s calm face and reassuring voice as Clint confronts his most emotionally charged memories with courage and curiosity.
As a study of a rugged individualist looking back on long-withered connections — to others, to the mainstream world, and indeed to himself — it feels personally invested both as a star vehicle and an auteur piece. If it isn’t, the joke’s on us, and still pretty funny.
Siberia juggles a number of intriguing ideas without any real success at marrying them. It’s an enjoyable watch, if only for the confident surrealism, albeit one which could inspire confusion and/or disgust in many film fans.
I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.
An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.
Siberia is a Freudian wallow made by a New York street fighter of a Fellini, and it is nothing if not authentic in its stress-fractured machismo.
Despite Willem Dafoe bringing gnarled gravitas to a screenplay which pinballs between oblique portent and grotesque shock tactics, this is an incoherent indulgence.
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