Someone I love has been sick and hospitalized and I’ve been feeling anxious. so I decided to watch a film about nuclear testing (Grey’s Anatomy, my go-to for comfort, seemed like a bad idea for obvious reasons). It’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is a Russian film called Test (Испытание) which I saw years and years ago around the time it came out in 2014, and have had in the back of my mind ever since. It’s set in Semipalatinsk, a remote part of Kazakhstan, where a lot of Soviet nuclear testing was carried out, and it has kind of a fairytale feel to it.
It’s basically about a love triangle between a young girl living with her father on the steppe and two young men who court her. She’s absorbed in her own emotional life, thinking about love all the time. Going about her dreary, isolated day-to-day routine, she smiles like she has a little secret. The film, which has no dialogue, pays a lot of attention to these expressions and to the small details that make up this world. One of…