Siberia (now on Amazon Prime Video) marked the sixth collaboration between Willem Dafoe and director Abel Ferrara, making them the DiCaprio and Scorsese of movies hardly anyone ever watches. It stings a little to say that, considering Dafoe is one of the greats of the current cinema, and Ferrara holds a sacred place in the hearts of Gen Xers, who were all indelibly traumatized by Bad Lieutenant. But you can’t help but admire these guys for passionately plugging away at their art, and pursuing their vision unconcerned about whether their work is at all accessible or comprehensible. Case in point, this movie.
SIBERIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Clint (Dafoe) narrates for about five minutes, over the sparse opening credits, so I hope you’re listening intently to his reminiscence about how his father would take him and his brother on fishing trips in wintry locales, and Clint would have to dash between the cabin and outhouse with the local husky dogs nipping at his heels and growling at the door. Now, something to see: A man, likely a woodsman of some sort, trekking across the brutal tundra to a dim-lit cabin nestled deep, deep, deep in the heart of a Russian winter. Clint lives here in this inn/bar, pouring tea or vodka for whoever happens to snowshoe or dogsled by. He serves a hot beverage to the woodsman, then heads out to feed his dogs and – what was that weird edit? Are there two Clints? Does he have a twin? Are we seeing a parallel narrative? Is this some good old fashioned mother-lovin’ dream logic or what?
I can’t answer these questions, mostly because the movie doesn’t state anything in obvious terms. It’s the type of movie that infers things, and implies other things, and features characters who speak Russian without subtitles, which is intentional. I think we just need to feel our way through this. Use the ol’ intuition. Try not to overthink things as Clint goes on a journey into a cave and into his own mind, a graduate-level psych-out that makes Luke’s trip into the hollow tree on Dagobah look like remedial Freud.
It begins with the aforementioned narrative blink and flows into sequences where Clint gets attacked by a bear – presumably not of the cocaine variety, but one can’t be certain – and does shots with two women, one elderly, and the other younger, who opens her jacket and shows him her naked, robustly pregnant body, which prompts him to take her into another room and sex her up and down. That’s only the beginning of the provocation, people. Whether the women stay or leave isn’t clear, but Clint soon thereafter harnesses the dogs for a sledding jaunt to destinations unstated; they stop to camp in a cave and Clint goes inside and watches a sunrise, and talks to his reflection in a cave pool, and it talks back, harshly and critically. Then he sees his dead father, also played by Dafoe, and then he sees the old woman from before, but she’s barely alive, her insides apparently having been torn out. It continues like this, doggedly illogical to all but perhaps Ferrara and Dafoe, who seem to be daring us to interpret it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Deposit Siberia alongside nutty and divisive late-career psychodramas by Ferrara’s peers: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (also with Dafoe) or The House That Jack Built, Werner Herzog’s My Son My Son What Have Ye Done (Dafoe’s in that one, too) or Queen of the Desert, Michael Haneke’s Happy End. ’90s cult freakout Jacob’s Ladder feels like a reference point, too. And let’s not forget The Revenant or Cocaine Bear, except with a far less-convincing bear in a scene whose creative editing is reminiscent of cheapo ’70s animals-attack thrillers. (Chalk that one up to budgetary restraints.)
Performance Worth Watching: By now we’ve realized that Dafoe is up for anything, from wearing ridiculous costumes in big ’busters like Aquaman or getting rrrrrrrawwwwww in artsy bullshit like Antichrist. He never goes halfway. Always all-in, that Dafoe. Not that Siberia will be a career highlight – those would be Wild at Heart, The Lighthouse, The Florida Project, The Northman, and The Last Temptation of Christ, just to name a small handful – but he digs in and makes Ferrara’s material almost penetrable, which is no small feat.
Memorable Dialogue: There’s a video poker machine in Clint’s place, and the man punching its buttons asks why Clint doesn’t play.
Clint: I don’t wanna win.
Man: Why?
Clint: I don’t wanna lose.
Sex and Skin: Graphic male and female full-frontal, sometimes accompanied by incredibly violent and disturbing imagery; a steamy-dreamy sex montage.
Our Take: Clint’s journey finds him wandering through fields of metaphors, deserts of analogies and mountain ranges of allegories, with plenty of symbols and allusions underfoot. Siberia is the type of film that would set academic psychoanalysts ABLAZE with all of its loaded imagery; they’ll be running around and snatching literary devices out of the air like a kid in a backyard full of fireflies. The character speak in riddles and we can’t tell if it’s night or day or if Clint is hallucinating or dreaming, if there’s even a difference. Mother, father, brother, wife, son, lovers all blur together in the film of Clint’s life that’s playing inside his head, and then he wanders up to a character played by Simon McBurney and says, “I’m interested in the black arts.” I’m not sure if we’re supposed to laugh at that, but I did. Felt like legit comedy.
And here I sit on the cusp of being compelled and having my patience tested. Even accounting for its array of blatant provocations – violence, sex, religion and incest are all very much within Ferrara’s wheelhouse – the film is far better than the director’s 2021 Ethan Hawke paranoid-COVID film Zeroes and Ones, which is part art-drivel, part no-budget actioner. But you have to admire Siberia for committing to its illogic, and finding a common thread in the Clint character, whose mind-adventure finds him unraveling knots of loneliness, yearning, regret and self-loathing. I can see it connecting deeper with some viewers than others, but either way, it’s almost wholly on a subconscious level. You’ll either be engrossed or vagued nearly to death, and it seems like Ferrara and Dafoe wouldn’t want it any other way.
Our Call: File Siberia under Not For Everyone. STREAM IT, but only if you’re up for a challenge.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.