Review of Moscow Zero

Moscow Zero (2006)
7/10
The gates to Hell
13 February 2008
MOSCOW ZERO is a really dark, mystical and supernatural film. The plot is very straight to follow since it's just about a quest to find SERGEI (played by Rade Serbedzija) an old friend of the father OWEN (played by Vincent Gallo) that went to the catacombs of Moscow alone. The entire movie is passed in there. Though the film has a very open ending, which is, by the way, very well connected to the mysterious and mystical ambiance that is always present… What I appreciated the most in the film was precisely this mystical and supernatural ambiance of this story and the way it was shot. It has a great cinematography, creating very dark and claustrophobic scenarios. The soundtrack is also good, because it also has mysterious, dark, melancholic and melodic music, like a ghost story must have! One other detail that I also appreciated was the fact of the demons were characterized only as shadows, as a dark light in the underworld… I found it so much better than the traditional way of characterize demons as little monsters with sharpened teethes, horns and a back tail…

I think this film is very well produced, though I agree it's a bit slow sometimes and could have been more suspenseful. However I also think this melancholy present in the plot and the soundtrack fits perfectly in a dark and mystical story like this.

The acting is reasonably good, but I only would like to mention the Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida, playing YURI character… It was a surprise to me hearing him speaking some lines in Russian, but he's a "box of surprises" anyway…

I also would like to say that I think this movie is too much underrated here on IMDb. I Liked this film, especially because of its ambiance as I said before, and I found pretty absurd that a user can say things like this: "There are two shameful reviews in IMDb promoting this movie and they are typically fake, written by users with only one review in this site". Just because he has more than 3000 reviews he thinks he's opinion is better than anyone else's! It's really sad…

My final vote to this different but good film is 7/10.
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