There are few cliches in film criticism that will induce more eye rolls than the claim that a location is so vividly realized that it becomes a character in its own right. But then, few films in recent memory have been quite like Unclenching the Fists, the sophomore feature from director Kira Kovalenko, premiering in the Un Certain Regard strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s one of the most striking cinematic portrayals of an abusive family home not because of its explicitness, but because of how effectively it frames a wider setting that feels just as stifling. In this case, it’s Mazur — a former coal mining town in the North Caucasus. 

Mazur is the kind of town that offers zero prospects to its young people, leaving only a generational bitterness towards those who decide to leave, even if they do eventually return from a planned new life in a big city. This isn’t highlighted through Unclenching the Fists’ cosmically bleak setting, nestled amidst imposing cliffs underneath impossibly grey skies, but via the few means of escape people have. The only nightclub appears to be inside a school gymnasium, which still has its volleyball net draped over the dance floor, while other favorite pastimes seem to exclusively be hurling firecrackers at apartment buildings that look more like prisons, and watching cars skid around a desolate piece of muddy land opposite. Tokyo Drift, this is most certainly not.

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Said apartment building is home to Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a young woman who is, along with her younger brother Dakko (Khetag Bibilov), effectively being held prisoner by her father (Alik Karaev). Neither she nor her sibling have a key to their own home and are only allowed out to work. Even then, Ada’s every move is controlled. When her father hears she’s attracting attention from a local boy, for example, he cuts her hair short and confiscates her perfume. When he starts to fear that she may too attempt an escape, like her older brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev), who has managed to escape his control, he hides her passport. There’s an even deeper underlying tension when it comes to Ada’s wellbeing, not restricted to her mental health, with the suggestion that her dad is effectively stopping her from having an operation to recover from scars across her stomach, related to a “school hostage crisis” she was a victim of years before.

Unclenching the Fists is unsparing in its bleakness, so it makes perfect sense that Kantemir Balagov, the director of Beanpole (and co-screenwriter of Kovalenko’s debut, 2016’s Sofichka) has described it as the best film of the decade. But while there are a couple of moments where Ada is treated with outright degradation, Unclenching the Fists is generally a lot less explicit in its depiction of emotional abuse than Balagov’s work, instead working best as a vivid portrayal of a family home where the lingering effects of years of harsher psychological torture hang thick in the air. It’s why Ada’s attempts to escape her father’s clutches are so agonizing to watch, as she at one point relies on a local boy who excels in a different kind of emotional abuse, feigning romantic interest just so he can sleep with her. In a film of unrelenting discomfort, the ways in which he manipulates Ada into spending time with him are the starkest. Even when out of the family home, Unclenching the Fists’ protagonist is unable to escape from the clutches of repressive men.