Review: The Fable-Like Ága Is a Haunted Ode to a Vanishing Way of Life

Nanook (Mikhail Aprosimov), an aging reindeer hunter, and his wife, Sedna (Feodosia Ivanova), live in a remote corner of Siberia, which, in director Milko Lazarov’s Ága, isn’t remote enough to be unaffected by global capitalism’s environmental footprint. Sedna mentions that spring seems to begin earlier each year, while Nanook notices that the area’s ice is a bit slushier, making it harder to catch fish. Even the once bountiful population of reindeer has dwindled to such a degree that Nanook questions whether or not it’s a delusion when he finally catches a glimpse of one on the horizon. Signs of industry remain mostly unseen, but the effects of environmental negligence have begun to stifle Nanook and Sedna’s increasingly futile attempts to keep the traditions and mores of their ancestors alive.

The name of Ága’s protagonist isn’t the only nod here to the 1922 silent classic Nanook of the North, as this film’s entire opening act takes a similar docufiction approach as Robert Flaherty’s pioneering documentary. Throughout, Lazarov is vigilantly focused on Nanook and Sedna carrying out various essential tasks in their ever-changing environment: building and setting animal traps, lugging heavy supplies or blocks of ice on their sled, fixing fishing nets, making homemade balm and skinning animals. It’s as if Lazarov is driven to record the inner workings of this singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.

Throughout Ága, the filmmakers make full use of the widescreen frame, often placing Nanook, Sedna, and their sturdy handmade yurt in extreme wide shots that highlight the vastness of the stark, unforgiving landscape they inhabit. But Kaloyan Bozhilov’s camera, as unyielding as the husband and wife’s worldview, also captures snippets of tenderness and intimacy between the two of them as they reminisce about earlier times and describe their dreams to one another. A more joyful past is hinted at when they look at an old picture of them and their estranged daughter, Ága (Galina Tikhonova), whom we learn had a falling out with Nanook years ago. This crucial piece of information brings a subtle tinge of melancholy to the film, tweaking our perception of the couple’s otherwise happy existence at the edge of the world.

When Chena (Sergei Egorov), Nanook and Sedna’s sole connection to the outside world, arrives on the scene, he brings not only a bundle of supplies, but also news of Ága, who now works at a diamond mine a few hundred miles away. His arrival also marks the film’s transition from a purely empirical account of Inuit rituals and routines to a mystical fable of sorts. At this point, the couple’s dreams become cryptically prescient, loosely foretelling the future, while a recurring black spot takes on the qualities of an illness that’s both literal (in Sedna’s worsening affliction and the dead snow fox Nanook discovers) and figurative (embodying the disintegration of the environment, a culture, and a family as well).

As Ága languorously builds to a crescendo, we glimpse the metaphorical manifestation of one of Sedna’s vivid dreams, in which she’s led to the home of a young boy she adopts: a hole in the ground that contains the light of all the stars in the sky above. After descending to the bottom, Sedna is blinded by the light and her memory is completely erased. In her recounting of the dream, this mysterious place is given an aura that’s both majestic and terrifying, much like the diamond mine we finally see at the end of Lazarov’s film. The mine is an enormous pit of Dantean proportions—a symbol of organized destruction that’s eerily reminiscent of permafrost crater. It’s an ominous vision, for sure, but the bittersweet absolution that’s found in this moment prevents the film from ending on a completely despairing note.