Andrei, a detective and the world’s most horrible father, brings together a terrible group of people in his apartment: his resentful actress daughter, an angry thug, and a cheated cop. Each one of them has a reason to want revenge…
Why Don't You Just Die! (or Daddy, Die! as it is otherwise called) is a Russian thriller, and the debut feature-length film written and directed by Kirill Sokolov. Visually resplendent, and bursting with energy, Why Don't You Just Die! only had a couple of screenings at the inaugural Terror-Fi Festival, but is a film that needs to be sought out. Buy it, stream it, petition the local independent cinemas to screen it.
This film is heavily stylized in such a way that you can feel many of its influences. Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and Danny Boyle are the obvious guides to the approach of this film. If you can't quite picture this film from those three names alone, we can go further. Combine the energy and scrappy fight sequences from Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, with the creative cinematography and tracking camerawork from Trainspotting, to portray the non-linear narrative of a hyperviolent story like Pulp Fiction.
The central narrative in the story is not altogether that lengthy. It begins quite far through the chronology, to the point where the main story is one extended fight scene, interrupted by back story and motivations displayed through the use of flashbacks. While non-linear stories can often be disjointed and convoluted, this story is very straightforward, and the flashbacks provide key character development as well as allowing for short intermissions between the action set pieces in the main chunk of the story.
There is an overabundance of blood in this film. It's dark, viscous, and plentiful. What this does is actually reduce the realism of the feature, the more blood introduced adding to the hilarity of the situation as it becomes further and further nonsensical and comical. It serves as a constant reminder not to take the violence and brutality seriously. The physicality of the film is absolutely brilliant, and the fight choreography, well-planned.
The cinematography is the real highpoint of the film, with extreme close-ups, dutch angles, extensive use of zoom, alow motion, and camera movements that sometimes literally follows our main character, Matvei, as he has to deal with Andrei. The zooming mixed with the extreme close-ups adds to the hilarity, with every event receiving a round of reactions from the players in the room. It almost starts to feel like a spaghetti western.
The opening scenes of the film are absolutely breathtaking, and if you have an affinity for physical comedy and hyperviolence (or if you enjoy the Deadpool movies) there is no doubt that you will be laughing out loud at many points.
This isn't a perfect film, though. The female characters are either completely passive or simply unlikeable, with motivations that do dampen the engaging tone in the third act. That final act also struggles with it's pacing; despite being only 100 minutes in length, it starts to drag in its final breaths as the film appears to try any means of extending out the runtime to maintain that "feature-length". In reality, the last 10 minutes of the film could have been severely trimmed down and allowed it to end on a strong point.
Vibrant colours, over-accentuated sound effects, and overbearing musical scores all come together with the hyper-violence to somehow create an astonishingly brilliant film. This is a must-see, by all accounts.