The Island

This visually ravishing, mentally numbing movie is set on a small, flat, misty island in remote northern Russia. In 1942, a teenage Soviet sailor is forced by his German captors to kill an officer. He survives the ordeal and 35 years later is Father Anatoly, a guilt-ridden, reclusive and uncompromising holy fool, living in the island's primitive monastery. His fellow Russian Orthodox clerics hang on his every eccentric pronouncement and imitate him, however mad his actions, and visitors from all over Russia come to him with their sick children, seeking his healing powers. There is an allegory lurking here, presumably of a mystical pre-Soviet Mother Russia reasserting herself. One is reminded of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and that anonymous Russian devotional work The Way of a Pilgrim , so much prized by Salinger's Franny Glass, as well as the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.