Siberia
Director: Abel Ferrara
Year Released: 2020
Rating: 0.5
Willem Dafoe's sixth collaboration with Ferrara has him as an American running a dinky bar in the middle of nowhere where he keeps having hallucinations involving the following: getting attacked by a bear, seeing naked disabled individuals, talking to his dead father, watching prisoners getting executed, wandering by a tribe caring for the ill, encountering a Magician (Simon McBurney) and asking him about the Black Arts, etc. The plot description posted online is "an exploration into the language of dreams," but that's a polite way of saying "a blizzard of Bad Symbolism and Philosophical Banalities" - it even ends with a talking fish - that makes me wonder if Ferrara is undergoing a psychological crisis or if he flipped through The Collected Works of C. G. Jung and just decided to record whatever random thoughts he had in his head. And if it's actually about Dafoe's exiled American making peace with his past, at the finale is he fully healed? Or has he even improved in the slightest? Does it matter?