What I Watched -- The Major

SLIFF movie #6 was The Major (trailer), which I saw by accident, and accidentally for free!  Here's what happened: T had sent me some links to films that looked good on one particular night.  T only had time for one, but I planned a double feature: one at 6:40 and one at 9:00.

I got to the Frontenac theater, and discovered what neither of us had noticed when we were looking at the website: the 6:40 show for this particular film was Sunday only.  It was Friday.  No dice.

I considered my other options, including (thanks to T, because this didn't occur to me) the non-SLIFF movies which were showing.  In the end, though, I settled on The Major, which was the other SLIFF film.  So that's how I saw it by accident.

While I was still on the phone with T, I saw a guy approaching some of the people in the ticket line.  I couldn't hear what anyone was saying, but I noticed him.  When I got oThe Major.  I spotted him down the hall, about to throw them in the trash.  I caught him before he did, and offered to buy one from him.  Turns out that he had gotten them for free, so he just gave one to me.  And that's how I saw it for free.
ff the phone and got in line to buy my ticket, I overheard someone say that the mystery man had tickets to

Now, on to the movie itself.  It's Russian.  It's heavy.  There's a lot of snow.  To quote Variety, it has "a very Slavic sense of miserabilism."  True that.

It opens with police major Sergey Sobolev racing to a nearby hospital after receiving a call that his wife is in labor.  He hits and kills a 7-year-old boy.  The boy's mother saw the whole thing.  Sobolev and calls a couple of his cop buddies, including Pasha, to help him clean up the mess he's made.

Sobolev and Pasha get orders from a non-descript higher-up to make the whole situation go away.  The boy's father has other ideas, and things start to spin out of control.

Plot-wise, this is not a ground-breaking movie.  But what was great about it is that the bad guy isn't really the bad guy.  Sure, he makes the phone call to his buddies, but then he has second thoughts.  You see him struggle with wanting to do the right thing, but knowing now that it's not only his career that is on the line if he comes clean.

Bottom line: calling it enjoyable isn't right.  But it's worth watching: a deep, dark movie for a dark, snowy night.

(In case anyone is wondering, the movie I had originally planned to see was Human Capital.)