Andrey Zvyagintsev’s missing-child drama is gripping and deeply upsetting, with performances that make parental neglect hard to watch. Its diagnosis of Russia can be heavy-handed; the family story is painful enough without it.
Loveless is a gripping, punishing drama about parents whose mutual hatred has left their son desperate for attention. Andrey Zvyagintsev begins with a marriage coming apart and follows the damage beyond the family, until a search for one missing boy becomes an accusation against contemporary Russia. We recommend it for the precision with which it shows neglect, despite some over-insistent attempts to make these parents speak for a country. The film is most convincing when it stays close to the child.
Maryana Spivak’s Zhenya and Aleksey Rozin’s Boris are convincing in the exhausting familiarity of their hostility. These are arguments in which neither expects to persuade the other, yet neither can stop. The screenplay by Andrey Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin allows their loathing to spread from the marriage to the child, with no comforting suggestion that parenthood will make them behave better. That is hard to watch, though the near-total lack of tenderness also begins to narrow what either actor can show us.
The glimpse of Alyosha silently crying is the scene that justifies the film’s severity. We were horrified. Matvey Novikov makes his distress so plain that the adults’ failure to notice him feels almost impossible to endure. It matters that the film lets us see what they do not: however far the story moves beyond the family, we keep thinking about this particular child and what he needs from his parents.
Mikhail Krichman’s cinematography sets the family within exact, chilly compositions, with room around people that seems to keep them apart. The winter landscapes have the same unwelcoming precision, and their beauty does nothing to make us want to linger there. Production designer Andrey Ponkratov gives the domestic scenes a similarly inhospitable feel, so being indoors offers little relief. That consistency makes the parents’ quarrels oppressive before either of them has finished speaking.
As the search widens, the film becomes a procedural, and its patience starts to work differently. Editor Anna Mass gives the effort to find Alyosha enough weight that other people’s attention begins to feel like a practical answer to his parents’ neglect. The volunteers are prepared to do something for a child who is not theirs, and the film’s view of them keeps its anger from becoming indiscriminate. We found their straightforward care deeply moving after so much domestic cruelty.
Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galperine’s music adds to the pressure; we never feel invited to enjoy the search simply as a thriller. The greater problem is the insistence that this marriage should explain an entire country. Andrey Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin have written the family with enough force that the broader political meaning can feel imposed upon it. Whenever the parents seem to be standing for Russia, their behaviour becomes too easy to categorise, and we lose some of the uncertainty that makes them frightening.
Missing-child dramas can turn suffering into a series of clues, with the search giving us something manageable to follow. Loveless makes that harder: our concern for Alyosha persists alongside our disgust with the adults, and neither feeling settles comfortably. At 122 minutes, it asks for sustained attention to people whose company we would ordinarily avoid. Choose it when there is time afterwards to sit quietly; anyone already raw about a child’s welfare should leave it for another evening.
