A boy strikes a match, illuminating his anxious little face, and warms his hands over its glow. He is lit up temporarily, but darkness is pervasive in this bleak offering from Eva Neymann.  Based on a short story by Ukrainian author Friedrich Gorenstein, who also wrote the screenplay for Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS, THE HOUSE WITH A TURRET follows a young boy as he makes his determined way to an unknown destination to visit his grandfather, suffering fear, hunger and loss along the way.

There is beauty in this bleakness, however, as one would expect from a former screenwriter for Tarkovsky. Much is owed, it seems, to the grand master of Russian cinema in this stunning and harrowing tale, and many parallels can be drawn.

Many moments in THE HOUSE WITH A TURRET pass in focus on the little boy’s head as he rattles along on his fateful train journey – an allusion to that momentous six-minute tracking shot in STALKER, surely, or perhaps an indication of how much influence Gorenstein may have had in the creation of some of Tarkovsky’s greatest strokes of genius. Perhaps, even, this common ground is simply symptomatic of the cold intensity of the bitter winter landscape of Soviet era Russia – THE HOUSE WITH A TURRET features countless long scenes of snow-bitten train tracks and winter-wearied troopers; empty fieldscapes with lonely trees; a 2-year-old Baboushka pouring tea brewed from air on frozen station steps, clutching a penny whistle to barter for friendship. Neymann does make her own mark in aspects of the cinematography of the film, the lack of colour and minimal music only serving to accentuate the heartrending pain of emptiness the film so embodies.

THE HOUSE WITH A TURRET shows the best and worst of human nature.

THE HOUSE WITH A TURRET shows the best and worst of human nature as we follow the newly orphaned boy on his weary way. Women so cold they must save all warmth for themselves and their nearest of kin. A grown man so hungry he will steal from a child. Blind countrymen drinking what little wealth they have and spending their courage against monied Comrades in defence of the many stricken poor. And yet, even in the depths of despair and war-torn desperation, there remains a scrap of humanity: in a cup of soup offered by trembling hands; in the pain in children’s eyes at the first music in months; in the midnight vigil of a child at his dying mother’s side. There remains, last of all, a smile.