Main cast: Alina Babak (Ksyusha), Olga Lomonosova (Tanya), Aleksey Rozin (Misha), Igor Khripunov (Fyodor), Gleb Kalyuzhnyy (Semyon), Andrey Marusin (Matvei), and Alexandra Cherkasova-Sluzhitel (Vera)
Director: Ivan Kapitonov
Ledyanoy Demon, or The Ice Demon as it is called on streaming services, is a Russian film about… okay, folks, forget what you guys see on the poster, because that thing doesn’t appear in this movie. This one is more of a jump scares and dark corridors kind of movie, playing on fears some people have of folks that are in a coma, You know, how sometimes, late at night, when one is alone with that vegetative stranger, perhaps they hear a strange sound, or maybe they think the person in the bed has moved a finger or a hand, ooh.
Oh yes, a demon is involved too, because we can’t have jump scares and dark corridors without one of those played-out things.
Ksyusha is living a blessed life. Her boyfriend’s father as well as her stepfather are against their relationship, and his stepfather is also feeling tad left out as she’s not close to him and poor Misha is convinced that, when given a choice, his wife Tanya and her daughter will throw him over without hesitation. This is in spite of the sacrifices he’s made for them.
Well, he may just be right when the cops inform them that they have discovered the body of Ksyusha’s father and, behold, he’s not dead, just frozen and in a well-preserved coma. Before the poor guy knows it, the wife has the body brought back to their home and she spends the whole day nursing and talking to the vegetable in the room, ignoring poor Misha.
However, things may be far worse than they appear at first, as Ksyusha is soon convinced that there is something off with her father. Maybe he’s not really in a coma or… gasp, maybe he’s not even human.
Maybe something got really lost in translation from Russian to English, but for the most part, I feel that the characters in this movie behave more for the sake of plot than anything else. For example, why is Ksyusha still with her boyfriend when Semyon forces her to play a game of Russian roulette with his father’s gun, a game that may kill her? I’d imagine any sane person would ditch this guy ASAP.
Sadly, I can understand better her mother’s continuous devotion to a man that treats her like a punching bag, as there are some people that continue to enable and even defend their abusers for various unhealthy reasons, but when I learn of the true extent of the secrets binding the main characters together, I have to question Misha’s apparent devotion to the mother.
These characters don’t act or emote like a typical person would in their situation. As a result, I often feel that these characters are purposely looking for problems just so that this movie can keep going, and I can’t relate to or care for them much. They are like robots programmed to go through the motions of a jump scares in dark hallways because of a demon kind of movie.
I don’t know, maybe this is how Russians do things and I’m not Russian enough to relate.
At any rate, there are some interesting ideas in here, but the result is tad underwhelming and even perplexing.
