‘April’ beautifully mixes abstract and real-life horror

“April” opens in a black void. A faceless and mangled woman wanders around in knee-high water for a few minutes in a removed static shot. What exactly we’re looking at and what she’s doing is a complete mystery. It then cuts to the ground level of a rainstorm for another few minutes, the droplets and whistling wind emulating what we’ve come to expect from those white noise machines. But then suddenly we’re watching a live birth take place from God’s vantage point. There’s no mistaking that this wasn’t faked for the movie; this is the beginning of life in all its agony and ecstasy.

The film was written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, a Georgian (the country, not the deep-fried American state) filmmaker whose masterful debut film “Beginning” was unfairly kept in the shadows simply because it was released during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The film was placed in the First Features category as part of that year’s Cannes Film Festival Official Selection, and gained a huge fan in Luca Guadagnino, who headed the jury at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and bestowed upon the film a record number of prizes, taking home Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress. Guadagnino serves as a producer for “April,” which looks and feels like a natural leveling up of Kulumbegashvili’s instincts as an artist.

Presiding over that opening birth is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili, reuniting with Kulumbegashvili), an OB-GYN who must put together the messes she inherits despite the limited resources allowed to her in the village. It turns out the pregnancy was never registered, which means neither Nina nor any of her colleagues were given the chance to find out that the lungs of the fetus were underdeveloped. The father makes accusations of malpractice against Nina, the prying eyes threatening to uncover the abortions she secretly performs in the village for girls who need them.

From a legal standpoint, abortion is allowed in Georgia up to 12 weeks into the pregnancy. However, the ultra-conservative Orthodox Christian views shared by the large majority of the country’s population make that right all but nonexistent. Clinics can (and almost always do) refuse to perform the procedure because of their beliefs, and any connection a person may have to it is enough to have them ostracized from the already confined communities. Viewers of “Vera Drake” back in 2004 may have been able to assuage themselves that the harrowing events took place in the 1950s before the 1967 Act made abortion legally protected in the United Kingdom. No such relief comes from within “April,” with the hostility toward women being felt in every frame.

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Each of those frames is expertly crafted by Kulumbegashvili and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan. They are unbroken and still, lasting for several minutes and often blocking someone or something out of the frame. When Nina performs an abortion in the village for a teenage girl, we watch her from the girl’s knees down as she writhes on the kitchen table from the pain. The boxed-in and closed-off nature of all these proceedings keeps both us and Nina isolated from what is fully happening in this part of the world. Between the unsettling abstract visuals at the beginning of the film and the brutal real-life truths about bodily autonomy, this is one of the most bone-chilling films of the year.

Sukhitashvili is an actress tailor-made to appear in films by Béla Tarr and Michael Haneke. Her control of bleak stillness is unparalleled. Whether the camera is far away or a few inches from her face, Kulumbegashvili trusts her at every turn. Nina’s past is kept in the dark; the few breadcrumbs we get here and there hint at romantic and professional trauma. Even as she tries to do the right thing, society makes her feel as if she’s making things worse.

Nowadays, almost every movie that brags that it needs to be seen in theaters is filled with extravagant visual effects and booming sound effects. The beauty of the cinema is not just in the sheer size of the speakers and screen, but the opportunity it gives us to break away from our world and be transported to a different one. This is the kind of movie where one of the top Letterboxd reviews states, “I fell asleep and when I woke up it was still the same shot.” Absolute patience and concentration are a prerequisite, with any glances at your phone or minor distractions at home stripping away the spellbinding effect Kulumbegashvili has crafted.

Metrograph Pictures has released “April” in New York and Los Angeles. It may expand nationwide at a later date and will be available on streaming.

Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.