Cult Cinema: Veld (1987) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Uzbekfilm

American author and screenwriter Ray Bradbury is among the most revered science-fiction fantasy/horror writers of the 20^th century, having written countless short stories, novels and screenplay contributions for notable film productions including but not limited to Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space.  Best known for Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes and most notably his short stories The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury’s work continues to influence both popular fiction and the silver screen in general, having generated numerous big screen and small screen adaptations of his works including but not limited to The Twilight Zone with I Sing the Body Electric.  A household name in science fiction alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, Bradbury’s imprint on all things science fiction related even years after his death is unshakable.

 
What you might not be aware of is that Ray Bradbury was also a favorite among Russian readers and filmmakers, having forged a friendship with War and Peace director Sergei Bondarchuk and seeing several of his works adapted into the Soviet science-fiction television series This Fantastic World.  Sometime in 1984, Uzbekistan based director Nazim Tulyakhodzhayev mounted an animated short film adaptation of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles short story There Will Come Soft Rains, a minimalist, avant-garde take on the lore of Bradbury.  Three years later under the Soviet production company Uzbekfilm, Tulyakhodzhayev moved all the way to his first live-action feature film: an adaptation of Bradbury’s surreal short story The Veldt or in this case Veld. 
 
A cautionary tale about the effects of technology on the role of parenting, Tulyakhodzhayev’s version written for the screen also works in elements of Bradbury’s other stories including The Dragon, Marionettes, Inc., The Pedestrian and chapters from The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine.  Focused on Michael (Yury Belyayev) and Linda Stone (Nelly Pshena) who live in their dour depressing mansion with their two children Peter (Daryus Palekas) and Wendy (Sigut Larionvayte), the children have stopped interacting with their parents and spend every waking moment inside a technologically advanced virtual reality room displaying an African safari with lions running wild.  Michael tries to curb their addiction by locking the door but to no avail.

 
Meanwhile an old fisherman named Hernando (George Gegechkori) and his blind wife Cora (Tamara Shirtladze) forage in a hut next to the beach, still in the throes of grieving their dead son Tom.  One morning a mysterious boy happens upon them, looking more than a little like their deceased son and they take him under their wing with unexpectedly shocking results.  Soon the paths of Michael and Hernando will cross in this dystopian nightmare world that starts to feel curiously not unlike the totalitarian horrors unleashed in Polish sci-fi/horror director Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy with masked soldiers in tanks dragging body bags through the decrepit streets, touching on numerous elements of other Bradbury works but still ultimately staying within the framework of The Veldt.

 
Posited in the same league as The Touch or Mister Designer for its atmospheric and spooky mixture of science-fiction, fantasy and horror, Veld is an eerie ambient slow burn with a look and feel that somehow or another echoes the rusty nightmare dreamlands of Silent Hill.  With a subtly soft yet creepy ambient soundscape by Feliks Yanov-Yanovsky that occasionally roars to life with the terrifying might of a pipe organ, just hearing the world of The Veldt is unsettling and vaguely threatening.  Then there’s Aloyzas Jancoras’ moody, brownish cinematography that elegantly captures the interior gloom of the mansion, designed brilliantly by Sergei Alibekov.  Let it be known this has one of the spookiest bedroom sets ever created for a film, with plastic tarps that drop down in lieu of fancy curtains that feels like a quarantined hospital of irradiated patients.
 
Performance wise, Yury Belyayev from Karen Shakhnazarov’s The Assassin of the Tsar makes our main hero sympathetic, frightened and in over his head.  Sharing if not wallowing in his horror is Nelly Pshena who balloons into hysterics not usually portrayed in Russian women onscreen.  Particularly sympathetic to this saga is George Gegechkori as the old fisherman mourning his son’s death who seems to find peace and tranquility for awhile before the rules of this sci-fi nightmare of Bradbury’s devising comes back to haunt him.  And the child actors, namely the son played by Daryus Palekas, have the unique task of becoming increasingly irate and threatening to their parents or in their eyes ‘adult captors’. 

 
A film seemingly lost to time save for the efforts of a few dedicated archivists to resurrect the film in a mostly worn but watchable 35mm print scan, the Uzbekfilm production of The Veldt is at once a straight-laced adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s iconic short story as well as a smorgasbord peppering of his other works kind of mashed together.  The finished film is mostly about The Veldt but it branches off into other periphery as it wades through its startlingly short running time, running a brisk eighty-one minutes.  For fans of Eastern European cinema, fantasy horror and all things Ray Bradbury related, Veld despite some rough-around-the-edges greenscreen matting effects and anamorphic squeezed footage in some shots is a miniature revelation. 

--Andrew Kotwicki