With his characteristic wit, and providing a perfect, educative example of what he was talking about, Samuel Beckett declared, ”I have a strong weakness for oxymoron.” Well, less educatively perhaps, I have a strong weakness for horror-fantasy movies with a large component of mumbo-jumbo. For this reason, perhaps I’m overrating the Russian movie Night Watch. The Guardian, after all, said that watching it was rather like being hit over the head with a large frying pan while heavy metal music blasted in the background.
Nonetheless, I found Night Watch amusing and engrossing, despite its frequent silliness. Such silliness is to be expected in this kind of movie (it is innate to the genre), and one takes that in one’s stride. One also accepts that good-versus-evil is the oldest and most boring plot in the world — one almost entirely devoid of content. It all depends on how it’s done.
Night Watch does it well. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, it was made for the equivalent of a mere $4-million or so, which, by Hollywood standards, is barely enough for a credit sequence. On that mini-budget, Bekmambetov has created a stylish piece set in contemporary Moscow, where the latest battle between good and evil is about to erupt.
A prologue set centuries ago shows how the forces of light and the forces of darkness reached an uneasy truce. In an echo of the Manichaean heresy, which is admittedly more plausible than Christian orthodoxy, their powers are equally balanced — in contemporary Russia, that probably goes as optimism. Now, centuries later, the deal is still in place: the Night Watch is the team of good guys who monitor the bad guys, amusingly named the Day Watch. But there is a belief that a special person will be born who will upset the balance, and everyone’s on the lookout for him or her.
Or at least the ”others” are. They are the people with supernatural powers who are either part of the Night Watch or the Day Watch. They mingle with ordinary people — not that one sees many of those. Everyone seems to be a vampire or a psychic or a shape-shifter of some kind, including protagonist Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), who discovers his mystic powers by accident, during a rather scary scene with a woman who does abortions by remote control.
There is some dry humour in Night Watch — in the clapped-out vehicles driven by the Night Watch, and in Anton’s casual relationship with his vampire neighbour. Good and evil live cheek by jowl here, which is more resonant than, say, the classic quasi-biblical Lord of the Rings scenario. That’s part of what gives Night Watch its charm — its down-home approach to all this mumbo-jumbo. The actors are not Hollywood-type good-lookers; they have not been styled up to near perfection. No leading designer has made their clothes. They even appear not to have washed their hair for the duration of the shoot.
The cinematography of Night Watch matches this dirty-realist style; it has a rough-edged vitality to it, as though the cameraman was being buffeted around by unseen forces too. Even the subtitles are inventively constructed. The ending is less climactic than it could have been, but that’s because Bekmambetov is saving his biggest bang for later — he is busy with the next two parts of the Night Watch trilogy. I, for one, can’t wait.