April

Anyone who’s seen David Lynch’s first movie knows that, though in heaven everything is fine, his “dream of dark and troubling things” takes place elsewhere. And while overt comparisons between Eraserhead and April might not extend beyond the latter’s abstract opening scene, in which a monstrous figure saunters across an otherwise empty black screen accompanied by the sound of children at play, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore feature is also about childbirth: its complications, its fallout, and also its prevention.

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It isn’t exactly a secret that Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) has a second, off-the-books vocation: “I know you give abortions in the villages,” a bereaved father tells the obstetrician before calling her a murderer early on. Tending to expectant mothers in the Georgian countryside, Nina is first seen delivering that man’s stillborn daughter in what’s likely the most graphic childbirth sequence ever seen outside a documentary. Despite there being little reason to think she’s at fault, fingers are immediately pointed and an investigation is launched — one made especially fraught by the persistent rumors that Nina is an abortionist.

Though the procedure isn’t officially outlawed in Georgia, it’s so heavily restricted that it might as well be. Nina does this work under cover of darkness, which Kulumbegashvili and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan show via POV shots of her car driving down moonlit roads accompanied by eerie sound design that’s very much of a piece with the opening scene. Visually and aurally, April is uniquely immersive. Its soundscapes are those of an experimental film, and parts of Matthew Herbert’s score were literally performed on bones.

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If it isn’t already clear, this movie isn’t for the squeamish or the faint of heart. Though a hit on the festival circuit — it won a special jury prize in Venice, where it premiered, before going on to screen at the New York, Toronto, and Sundance film festivals — it’s likely to be a niche title now that it’s in theaters. Even horror fiends who delight in sensationalized blood and guts will have their sensibilities tested by Kulumbegashvili’s unnerving mix of documentary realism and surrealist interludes. But it’s such a bravura display of filmmaking that you’ll keep your eyes on the screen even when you want to look away, with Kulumbegashvili more than fulfilling the potential she showed in 2020’s Beginning. April cements her status as a major cinematic talent, one who’s made a statement without delivering a preachy message movie.

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She’s done so with much assistance from Sukhitashvili, who also starred in Beginning. Stoic but never saintly, Nina knows the risk of her moonlighting and accepts them unquestioningly. “Other than my job,” she tells a concerned colleague who advises her to keep a lower profile, “I have nothing to lose.” If only that were true. (Another holdover from Sukhitashvili’s first movie, albeit indirectly, is Call Me by Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino. He presided over the jury at San Sebastián Film Festival jury when Beginning set a record by winning four awards and was apparently so smitten that he came aboard her follow-up as a producer.)

If it isn't already clear, this movie isn't for the squeamish or the faint of heart.

The humanoid, vaguely alien creature we see in the beginning reappears several times, usually by itself but occasionally interacting with other characters who seem to recognize or at least understand it. That’s more than most viewers will be able to say, but these sequences nevertheless have a raw, evocative power unlike anything seen onscreen so far this year. Ditto occasional interludes that are more painterly, highlighting the beauty of the natural environs in which Nina finds herself while carrying out her duties — in divergent ways, both elements appear to be projections of, or distractions from, the roiling emotions she carries below a deceptively placid surface.

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Though far from heavy-handed, April’s position on the hot-button subject at its core isn’t difficult to glean. Not unlike fellow prizewinners 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Happening before it, the film makes an implicit argument in favor of abortion by showing the inevitable consequences of outlawing it: unsafe procedures, dead patients, and persecuted physicians forced to make an impossible choice between obeying the law and honoring their oath. Why, then, does Nina persist? No one wants to do this work, she says, but someone has to do it.