Hard to Be a God

The final film from the great Aleksei German is an utterly singular cinematic experience. German spent 15 years working on this adaptation of the Strugatsky Brothers’ Hard to Be a God (1964), with the film completed posthumously by his son and widow. Leonid Yarmolnik is hypnotic as Don Rumata, a human scientist sent to observe events on the planet of Arkanar – a world analogous to Earth but stuck in a perpetual Middle Ages of superstition and brutality. Published in the year that Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev, Hard to Be a God is one of the Strugatskys’ most cynical works, and German goes all out in his efforts to capture their pessimism at the future of enlightenment.

German transforms the dense internal monologue of the novel into a sensory overload of rain, mud, and blood, his serpentine camera drifting through a fully realised medieval backwater described by critic Michael Atkinson as “an utterly Boschian shitstorm of reeking ruins, animal parts, unruly fires, and deformed minions.”

This screening is part of the programme After Utopia: The Strugatsky Brothers on Film.

Hard to Be a God, dir. Aleksei German, Russia/Czechia 2013, Russian with English subtitles, 177 min.