‘April’ Review: Abortion Drama Is a Singular Horror Show

Don’t let the name fool you: “April” is a wintery affair. By far the most uncompromising vision to play at this year’s Venice Film Festival, director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow cinema horror show might also be the most audacious. That audacity translates less by way of length or provocation – Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Harmony Korine’s “Baby Invasion” have those laurel locked up – than by way of self-assurance, from the filmmaker’s steadfast belief in her own creative gambit to her audience’s willingness to immerse themselves within.

This is, in so many words, a swing for auteur enshrinement so crystalline in intent that it namedrops Mikhail Kalatozov’s “The Cranes Are Flying” and visually cites Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” from the very jump.

Kulumbegashvili can reasonably wager on her film’s long-term prospects once it meets the right crowd (“April” boasts the producing support of Luca Guadagnino, who showered Kulumbegashvili’s prior effort, “Beginning,” with just about every eligible prize when he headed the San Sebastian jury in 2020), but the diverging festival response between Kalatozov’s 1957 Palme d’Or winner and Glazer’s 2013 subject to boos and jeers reflects the shakier outlook for such formal extremes upon immediate arrival.

Of course, the film is all too conversant in those particular risks, capping an opening prologue that finds a humanoid monster slinking into a pitch black abyss with a depiction of live childbirth for an infant that (narratively, at least) doesn’t last minutes in this world. Shot from above and leaving nothing to the imagination, the extended sequence has a jolting effect, at first shocking with a clinical view of the single act that unites us all (don’t worry those born of Cesarean, Kulumbegashvili later circles back to cover that as well) before lingering long enough for us to wonder why an act so common should remain so obscure.

Viewed in a certain way, “April” can be described as a character study centering on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), the OB-GYN-turned-scapegoat upon that tragic turn. Only we don’t actually see Nina’s face fully lit in close-up until the one-hour point, nor do we hear her name spoken aloud before the penultimate scene. Instead, Kulumbegashvili overlays perspectives, collapsing her camera, her lead, and her audience atop one another. If not fully assuming the first-person, the film often frames interactions in near POVs that hew the character’s general eye-line and position in space at a given time.

Even when it breaks or plays with that framing and blocking device, “April” subsumes the main character’s Hippocratic view into all aesthetic choices. As a doctor, Nina is, rather by definition, a clinical pragmatist; she treats the symptoms and tries to resolve the problems in front of her. That one of those issues is the complete lack of (legal) family planning in this devout and rural patriarchy doesn’t really faze our physician. Somebody’s going to do it, she figures; might as well be the one with medical training. As with that early birthing sequence, the film translates this same clinical reasoning in visual terms, confronting elements often left off-screen and casting them in cold light.

Time and again, Nina confounds the patriarchal order by refusing it recognition, but she pays the price for her insolence, from a transactional sexual encounter turned violent once she asks for reciprocation, to the career put in danger once rumors of her extracurricular medical services begin to swirl. That career is all she has, as the price for living beyond the reigning order is a life of solitude and abnegation. The director’s almost-but-not-quite POV compositions accentuate that solitude, framing characters in conversation or sexual congress as completely isolated forms.

Shirking exposition until absolutely necessary, “April” follows Nina over a nominally condensed period of just a few days, all destabilized by long takes that curdle and warp the felt passage of time. We see her with a hospital superior whose overly familiar questions might hint at workplace harassment until we learn of their shared past and undimmed flames. We see travel across vast plains whose great expanse belies a cloistered world where everyone is up each other’s business, and we see her at work, both on the clock and off. As it builds a rather deliberate pace, the film implicates and includes us in Nina’s sense of trudging responsibility until we finally see her face in full as her eyes beam at the sight of a healthy newborn, and better understand the passion that guides her.

Lest we slip too close to realism, Kulumbegashvili often returns to that opening homunculus – a stooped figure with a spine protruding from mounds of melted flesh that might be a version of Nina finally removed from all the human impulses still anchoring her, or maybe something completely different (a wink to that goop deformed thug from “Robocop?” Who knows — this is an open text). To that end, the odd sight adds a final, unresolvable question to a film that continually makes formal leaps assuming that the audience drawn in will work alongside to catch up. That takes a certain mad audacity, and a level of belief both in self and in the audience that flatters – and bewilders.

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