Cadet

***1/2

Reviewed by: Marko Stojiljkovic

Cadet
"Yerzhanov opens the film strongly, using his trademark dark humour." | Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

Last year, Adilkhan Yerzhanov completed and presented no less than three features which all featured Anna Starchenko in prominent roles and enjoyed premieres at big festivals. Unlike Steppenwolf (premiered at Rotterdam) and Moor (premiered at Tallinn Black Nights) that got some international attention, Cadet flew pretty much under the critics’ radar. After its premiere at Tokyo, the film was shown at this year’s Berlinale (Forum section), Hong Kong and Haapsalu White Nights.

Cadet should serve as a companion piece, maybe even a weird prequel to Moor in some stretched movie universe, but there is a bit of genre difference here. Yerzhanov, known for his unique combination of genre approach and “guerilla” production conditions usually sticks to the mixture of drama, dark comedy, action, thriller and neo-western, but now he plunges straight to horror. Echoes of the now popular “elevated” approach to the genre are to be heard in a vision that blends American, European and even East Asian influences. An additional novelty, also present in Moor, is that Yerzhanov now comments on Kazakhstan society and its co-dependency with Russia, both in a Soviet and post-Soviet context, more directly than before.

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The titular protagonist is Serik (the newcomer Serik Sharipov), a teenager brought by his mother Alina (Starchenko) to an elite military school in a semi-fictional town of Karatas – which is often the main stage of Yerzhanov’s cinematic stories – where she has landed a job of a history teacher. The young fellow does not seem much of a soldier-type, with his longish emo-style haircut and his dreamy-loner attitude, and it is a given that he would have trouble fitting in with the rest of the students who seem way more hardened. The stern school principal, only referred to as colonel (Aleksey Shemes) is of the same opinion, but he does not know that the two are related to someone further up in the hierarchy: Serik is an illegitimate son of the dreaded Bolat Asanovich. However, it seems that Serik’s future comrades “didn’t get the memo” about going easy on him regarding hazing, so he gets bullied regularly.

The school also has a history of suicides within the ranks, which is something that the colonel and his subordinates do not try to conceal, as it is a prestigious military academy and not everyone can take the pressure. When the next one occurs, Alina gets frightened that Serik might be the victim. But when the military police inspector Birzhan Rakhymzhanov (Ratmir Yusupzharov) comes to interrogate him along with other cadets and personnel, the boy does not act like his usual self. Is the boy “making” his peers, teachers and training officers to commit suicide and is it all connected to a curse coming from Nergal cults which strikes every 14 years, resulting in one school cadet killing two his peers, his mother and himself?

Yerzhanov opens the film strongly, using his trademark dark humour and creating the mood by the means of eerie, droning music composed by Sandro Di Stefano. He also employs a bluish-gray colour palette and slowly moving dolly shots lensed by the filmmaker’s regular collaborator Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev. Unfortunately, the filmmaker here uses some “sprinter’s logic”, so the level of tension from the start cannot be kept for the whole duration. The steam blows off until the half-time mark when the story falls into the rails of genre clichés with some local “flavours”. More determination in the editing department would have helped trimming some excess runtime from its 127 minutes.

The acting remains strong, though, as Yerzhanov is known for his knack of picking the right non-professionals and working with them to perfection. As one of his previous discoveries, Starchenko fills the role of a strong-willed single mother perfectly and with confidence. Sharipov gets to play the type of a creepy movie kid in a “violence begets violence”-type of a story, but Yusupzharov fares a bit better playing with the detective-type. The only experienced actor, Shemes, chews the scenery and the dialogue as a proper baddie, which is quite fun to watch.

Elevated horror might not be Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s thing yet, but there is still enough to be taken from Cadet. With Yerzhanov’s provocations by the means of finely faked “archival” photos and Soviet-era military propaganda posters always finding their way into the background of the shot, it becomes a better experience in the way the filmmaker clearly, but tastefully comments on the historical and current affairs between Kazakhstan and Russia, meaning former country’s voluntary servitude to the latter.

The years when the “demons” wake up are not chosen randomly either, as an example of Soviet or Russian dirty war or military engagement abroad could be found tor each, starting from 1938 in Finland, all the way to 2022 in Ukraine. Seeing it in another post-Soviet country, Estonia, that shares land border with Russia and is preparing for a potential invasion is quite an experience that makes people think about whether the “demons” are just a convenient trick or if they might be real.

Reviewed on: 12 May 2025
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Cadet packshot
A mother Alina tries to enroll her son, Serik, in an elite military academy, but he is bullied by his classmates.

Director: Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Writer: Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Starring: Sharip Serik, Aleksey Shemes, Anna Starchenko, Ratmir Yusupzhanov

Year: 2024

Runtime: 126 minutes

Country: Kazakhstan

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