Joyce Glasser reviews April (April 25, 2025) Cert. 15, 134 mins.
Georgian writer-director Déa Kulumbegashvili’s (Beginning) new film is entitled April, although it’s not clear why. Kulumbegashvili also withholds information about her main character, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a single 40-something obstetrics doctor who is so intriguingly mysterious and self-destructive that this decision proves frustrating.
Even more frustrating is the tedious series of long, static takes that open the film. The sound effects team are going full throttle, but we don’t know what’s going on. Shots of a swamp, groans and hazy images of either a very old woman or the Creature from the Black Lagoon are juxtaposed with a long take of heavy rain on a body of water. But it is shot in such close up that we do not know what body of water it is, and we never find out.
What that montage gives way to is no less off-putting. Screaming and inaudible talking under the bright lights of a hospital delivery room and a close up of a woman’s vagina, blood and bodily fluids included, as she gives birth on camera. But there is no joy in this gloomy movie. In the next scene we learn that the baby does not survive.
Nina, an experienced doctor in a top hospital in Georgia is called into the director’s office. The father is threatening a malpractice suit and wants an inquiry. It is a badly kept secret that Nina provides abortions to impoverished women. In Georgia, an abortion is legal up to 12 weeks, and some of Nina’s customers do not even realise they are pregnant at 24 weeks. Or they don’t want their parents or husbands to know.
The distraught, angry would-be father suspects that Nina’s failure to deliver his baby was intentional and judgmental, given his financial status. His complaint is a kind of blackmail as if he brings in Nina’s illegal pastime, she will lose her job.
What the father doesn’t know is that the investigation will be carried out by David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) Nina’s protective ex-boyfriend, now married with kids, who still cares about her. He warns Nina about the consequences of her risk taking, but he doesn’t know the half of it.
On her trips into the bleak, inhospitable countryside for the abortions, Nina stops at garages, livestock markets and car washes, approaches strangers and has sex with them. One awkward rendezvous in Nina’s car, which seems to have been prearranged, does not go well and we fear for her life.
But it’s hard to care much for Nina as she is so cold and distant. It doesn’t help that we don’t know her backstory, she has no social life and dialogue of any sort is scarce. Even performing an abortion on a mentally challenged girl while her father is out ploughing the field, Nina is a woman of few words and little emotion.
But it’s clear as day that she’s a deeply troubled soul.
Nina is, however, performing a public service. And she is courageous. There’s a tense scene when her car gets stuck in the mud and she has to return to the dilapidated farmhouse where she had just performed the abortion. This time the farmer is home, ominously wary about her presence. We breathe normally again when he orders his wife to get her something to eat.
In these farmhouse scenes, we get our first and only clue about what the film might be about. For what is striking is the contrast between the sophisticated, 21st century world of the hospital and the time warped countryside where the men are brutes and barbarians and the wives are illiterate breeders and slaves. But this contrast is so underdeveloped – and it doesn’t help that Nina prostitutes herself to these brutes – that maybe that’s not the point of the film after all.
And if you think the result of the medical investigation will lead to some climactic crossroad in Nina’s life, you are wrong. Nina’s future remains under wraps.
After some time the gruff, silent farmer helps Nina get her car moving. But not before we are subjected to another long take of dark clouds on a forlorn field, and not before the creature makes several more appearances throughout the film, even sitting in what appears to be Nina’s depressing apartment.
The apparition must be symbolic, and we suspect it exists in Nina’s subconscious. But Kulumbegashvili shows no interest in letting us into the meaning of these visions or into what’s eating the enigmatic Nina.
