In Kirill Serebrennikov's tightly wound symbolic drama, a Russian high schooler starts spouting off biblical verses at the teachers, administrators and teens around him, decrying the hypocrisy of their ways and of a fallen world. You can feel the allegory coming from a mile away, but that doesn't mean you won't get pulled into Serebrennikov's resonant, ideologically charged universe.
Venya (Pyotr Skvortsov) is already pretty much a man possessed by the time we meet him, refusing to attend swim class because of the immodesty of the girls' bikinis and the thought of boys and girls hanging out together half-naked. As his overworked single mother wonders if this piety might just be a phase her son is going through, Venya ratchets up the sermonizing, spitting rage and mockery, even stripping naked in outrage in a biology class when the teacher dares to talk about condoms.
That teacher, Elena (Viktoriya Isakova), eventually emerges as the one force of true resistance against Venya, even as the boy's rhetoric becomes more unhinged and unforgiving, even violent. Everyone else, though, starts to coddle him; at heart, what he's saying is just a dramatically less politic expression of what they themselves already kind of believe. Thanks to his complaints, the bikinis are replaced by single-piece swimsuits, and the school principal challenges the idea of sex education. Later, when Venya objects to the teaching of Darwin, that same principal asks Elena why she can't just teach both sides of the evolution “debate.” When Venya drags a giant cross into the music room and nails it to the wall, the only objection is that it's a little crooked. Soon enough, Elena, the sole voice of reason, finds herself persona non grata, as the other adults begrudgingly reveal their own reactionary attitudes about sin, science, homosexuals and Jews. And yes, a portrait of Vladimir Putin does occasionally appear in the background.
A simple description of The Student, based on German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's 2012 drama, The Martyr, might make it sound ruthlessly blunt, and I suppose at times it is; there are even helpful titles at the edge of the frame, citing the biblical sources of Venya's words. But Serebrennikov leans into the story's theatricality while also finding ways to make it resoundingly cinematic. Each scene plays out in an uninterrupted long take, as the Steadicam glides up staircases and through corridors and around the characters. In the hands of a lesser actor, Venya's crazed, lengthy tirades might have felt stiff and stagebound, but Skvortsov delivers them with such wild-eyed conviction and energy that they're riveting. The film never stops moving. The actors dart around furiously; it all resembles an angry, fevered dance.
Serebrennikov immerses us in the action, which makes the overt allegory easier to take. But his scenes also build to moments of delirium, as if creating a cinematic corollary to the dark exaltation Venya must be feeling as he hurls bile and Bible at the world. The boy's eruptions are terrifying, but they're also powerful — we can understand why people follow lunatics like this. But the film's vigor doesn't quite last all the way through: As the story heads toward a resolution, the symbolism verges toward the clunky, and the incidents become increasingly contrived. Still, for most of its running time, The Student is immensely compelling, a wild ride between hothouse realism and dreamy metaphor.