Karmadonna

Jelena (Jelena Djokic) is a middle-aged woman whose IVF pregnancy was considered a miracle. She gets a strange phone call from an omnipotent blackmailer who wants her to kill some people. At first, we are not sure whether it’s a real blackmailer or just her mind playing tricks on her, but when she feels some very real pain and the very real risk of losing the baby, she plays along.

Ahead of this mismatched couple is a night of violence, insane encounters, close calls and some blows they couldn’t avert.

The latest milieu of cinema to become formulaic was the international genre film as defined by famous festivals, with Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness sidebar as the crowning selection. Initially, art-inclined genre sidebars showcased transgressive works that felt unsafe, perpetuated cultural dialogue among different countries and fresh approaches to tropes that are associated with midnight screenings in urban cinemas encompassing horror, science fiction, action and exploitation of every kind. Some films like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) managed to cross over into official selections of major festivals but eventually the divide solidified.

And just as soon as we started to be ironic towards staples of midnight madness selections like A24 horror films and so on, a film arrives that is so fresh in that context that it almost doesn’t belong there.

Karmadonna is a Midnight Madness film, alright. It wouldn’t fit anywhere else, except maybe in a bold Cannes selection. In recent years we’ve never really witnessed such conviction in a Midnight Madness film and at the same time such level of cinematic literacy and pure glee for a genre bent, spun around and realigned to still give us what we like about it.

Not unlike contemporary art, current Midnight Madness films usually feed upon their predecessors, sometimes they feel as if they were assembled as the most common studio pitch aimed at the cool kids with known elements freshly combined.

In those terms, Karmadonna is a beast of its own as well. It was directed by Aleksandar Radivojevic, the man who wrote the screenplay for A Serbian Film, one of the most controversial midnight movies of the past couple of decades. That film also had a very muscular vision of horror which was so old school that even the most well-organised censor boards blushed at what was proposed. A retired film critic himself, Radivojevic brings a staggering level of cinematic literacy to his film and while it is brimming with references, it works completely on its own.

Structurally, this is an action thriller, reminiscent of the early contained thrillers of the early 2000s, most of them penned by Larry Cohen, the likes of Phone Booth and Cellular. However, this film is not contained and is expansive in its use of Serbian capital Belgrade as its sandbox. But the tension of a two-hander, however warped, is there and as the movie progresses, this relationship based on domination turns into pure buddy chemistry.

Brian Taylor comes to mind as a solid defining agent as well. It has this sense of quest like Crank but it is also wildly reminiscent of his television masterpiece Happy! With Happy!, it shares not just a protagonist – with an imaginary and yet so very real and wonderfully annoying friend – but also the same kind of Grant Morrison-infused universe of villains, henchmen and hangers on.

I’ve dropped quite a few names by this point, which reminds you of a typical Midnight Madness review that usually comes with a lot of name-dropping, right? So, where is this difference I was talking about?

The difference is, Radivojevic goes all in. This film is no joke. It’s not a send-up. It’s not a throwback. It’s an action thriller whose violence readily goes into horror territory, and its plot has no problem becoming irrational or supernatural. It holds nothing back – it’s funny, violent, suspenseful and tense while still discussing our current cultural moment, both locally and globally, and being very incisive and dangerous about it. Radivojevic deals with issues that are real, and he does it by leaning on some beautiful genre masters.

Reviews will go about name-dropping, and I bet the names Brian De Palma and Takashi Miike will be tossed around a lot. But if we really need to invoke any other name, it’s Richard Donner. Karmadonna has this old school, serious-minded approach and feels as if Donner took The Omen and reformatted it like a Lethal Weapon film.

With this powerful directorial debut, Radivojevic not just adds but also expands on A Serbian Film, proving that his screenwriting was the crucial element that set it apart. Now, he is building a body of work that will eventually make him become a reference and a name we use to describe other people’s work.

Karmadonna is a unicorn of a film, and Radivojevic is a unicorn of a filmmaker. We were lucky enough to be present for his full-bodied (no pun intended) debut.

People should go in expecting a great film, made by an author who loves and deeply understands the same films we do. But it’s a substantial ride with stakes that are higher than usual in every conceivable sense.

Reviewed on: 15 Sep 2025