My Joy (2010)

My Joy is the kind of film that feels less like a story you watch and more like a road you travel—hypnotic, ominous, and strangely beautiful even when it hurts to look. It takes a simple journey and lets it curdle into a dark fable, where each encounter carries the quiet dread of a bad dream you can’t wake from, captured in stark, pictorial images that linger in the mind. The suspense isn’t built on twists so much as atmosphere: a mysterious, absorbing sense that the landscape itself is conspiring to swallow the protagonist whole. This is not an easy or comforting drama—its brutality is part of its point—but if you’re drawn to provocative cinema with a poetic soul and the courage to stare at alienation without blinking, it’s unforgettable.

My Joy is aiming for a grim, road-bound descent into the moral rot of post-Soviet Russia, using Georgy’s increasingly nightmarish detours to paint a bigger picture than a simple plot. The problem is it often communicates in fragments and dread, so if you need clear motivations, tidy cause-and-effect, or even a hint of relief, you may find it opaque, disjointed, and punishingly bleak. It can also feel like it’s daring you to call it profound, which is where the “overrated” and “more style than substance” complaints come from. That said, if you’re patient with ambiguity and can handle brutality in service of atmosphere and social commentary, it has a stark, unsettling power that lingers.