‘April’ Review: A Timely and Terrifying Abortion Story in Eastern Europe | Venice

All over the world, with the rise of the alt-right, attempts are being made at a daily pace restrict the access to abortion. The landmark ruling of Roe v. Wade was reversed by the US Supreme Court no less than 2 years ago, while in many other Western countries getting an abortion is becoming increasingly difficult – for example, in Italy the percentage of conscientious objectors, people who refuse to perform abortions based on their religious beliefs, are on the rise. All these arguments would make Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, premiering in Competition at the 81^st Venice Film Festival, an extremely timely film, but the radicality of its approach make it even more compelling.

April starts with an unnerving image of an alien-like creature walking on water, and we’re immediately pushed to ask ourselves what that creature stands for: after all, it is alien-like, but it also is human-like, with a sort of wrinkled and hunched-over body, the heavy sound of its breath. The nerve-wracking aspect of the scene is heightened by the sound of two young girls playing together: one of them is called Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili). Nina, we discover, is the protagonist of the film: she’s an obstetrician in rural Georgia, and during her first sequence, we see her perform a childbirth gone wrong. The child is stillborn, and Nina is accused of malpractice by the father of the baby, but his accusation goes one step further: she’s accused of performing illegal abortions. As a matter of fact, Georgia has very strict abortion laws, as clinics can decline request for abortions at their discretion, and certainly no later than 12 weeks into a pregnancy. The film doesn’t really delve into whether Nina does indeed perform those abortions, as it’s quite taken for granted that she does. And by the looks of it, that must have taken a huge toll on her.

Nina doesn’t seem to have a social life. She had a relationship with one of her coworkers who still thinks of her, but now the only social encounters that take place are when she wanderingly drives at night in the desolation of the Georgian landscape. Yeah, the landscape. Kulumbegashvili films her own country with pictorial eloquence, and she makes it a terrifying sensory experience: it can be a hailstorm, a sunny day in the countryside or a windy day with storm clouds ominously approaching, there’s always a sense of savage nature and eternal beauty in the depiction of Georgia in the director’s hands. The tonal whiplash of these images effectively mirrors the sentiments of Nina: in the exceptional performance given by Ia Sukhitashvili, Nina experiences existential dread and despair (who wouldn’t, in her situation?), but she’s also caring and affectionate in her demeanor towards women in need. “Nobody wants to perform abortions, so I have to do it”, that is the sentence of a woman on a mission, but that mission is clearly consuming her. She looks exhausted, deprived of her vitality, crushed by the world around her. She isn’t particularly interested in interpersonal relations, but she’s full of empathy. She almost becomes a sort of Christian figure in her attempt to absorb and store all that negativity into herself: in a way, she is a heroine.

All of that nearly sounds like a contradiction in a film that immediately makes itself noted for its extreme rigor. Pace is dilated to an almost maddening level, dialogue is diluted in time (though never in substance), and for a movie that moves so glacially, it’s boiling under its surface. The soundscape is so crispy that every rattling sound is heard, the camera is never entirely static, the lighting is constantly unnerving: it’s a movie that contrasts its apparent dullness with a perennial horror undertone. The characters can be seen from different perspectives: we can see through their eyes, or we can see them through someone/something else’s eyes, in a world that offers beauty and peril at the same time.

Like April is a month of contrasts, April is a movie of contrasts: the childbirth sequence is taken from a real birth operation, so much so that it is, of course, scarily graphic, but the sequence of an abortion performed by Nina is filmed off camera, only punctuated by the sounds of the girl who’s receiving it; it can be terrifying as it can be beautiful. It is a movie that almost rejects dialogue: in Kulumbegashvili, actions define a person.

It’s a dangerous world out there. Family is supposed to protect us, but it doesn’t; the state is supposed to support us, but it doesn’t; nature can be both splendor and horror. And yet, in a way, it’s a strangely poetic world. The viewer is left in awe of it, with very long takes that allow to be looked at as if they are actual paintings, tableaux vivants of sorts. There is the chance to absorb them, assimilate them, study them, in a way enter them: for a movie so emotionally desperate and detached, it’s incredibly immersive.

At the end of it, the viewer is left stunned, silent and overwhelmed. It’s a 136-minute movie that is both parse and rich, literal and enigmatic. For two hours we’re in the company of Nina, we are Nina, and we are in the company of her soul, with, justifiably, as many questions at the end as we had at the beginning. Isn’t that the mark of a great film?

This review is from the 2024 Venice Film Festival where April world premiered in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.