Cadet

Resolutely, Alina and her son Serik are shown round the premises of the “best military school” in Kazakhstan by its headmaster. Alina will teach history here, of all places, and Serik will attend the school as a cadet. However, the discipline prescribed doesn’t work for the shy boy, with his girly hairstyle making him the target of malice and bullying, despite having the right connections – as Serik’s biological father is a key figure behind all the goings-on as a protector. It happens as it happens in (post-)horror: first one pupil dies, then the next. Murder? Suicide? And what role do the mothers play? Obfuscation, threats, harassment – an investigator from a municipal authority is tasked with finding out. The spiritus sovieticus also oozes out of every nook and cranny of this great film, the latest from Kazakh genre-auteur wunderkind Adilkhan Yerzhanov. In Cadet, this spirit seeps out as an education-of-monsters via architecture, ritual and rhetoric, physical violence and psycho-horror, as the cadaver’s stench from the dungeons of repressed history into the present of evil. Yerzhanov’s subtle and deliberately naïve question isn’t how evil is possible – but why good is possible.