Six years ago, I saw Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s Space Dogs (2019) playing in competition at Locarno. I was struck by its docufictive premise, its scenes shot at nighttime in high exposure, and its overall conceit. Two roving Muscovite hounds — real dogs in real habitats — are imbued with the consciousness of Laika, the first dog sent up by the Soviets to successfully orbit the earth. These themes and sensibilities, particularly the emphasis on animality to articulate the human condition, return in White Snail, which has been advertised as the directors’ first outright fiction feature.
I had wondered then whether Kremser and Peter’s hybrid approach could be illustrative of a cinematic trend known as the galactic gaze, a laughably self-satisfied term that I’d made up. What White Snail (2025), set and shot in Belarus, reveals, is that their blurring of reality and imagination serves a more grounded purpose: to understand social relationships in periods of geopolitical crisis.
The love story at its centre is inspired by the lives of two nonprofessional actors who inhabit the main roles. Masha (Marya Imbro) is a prospective model, slim with an albino countenance, peroxide hair and bleached eyebrows. Misha (Mikhail Senkov) is a nighttime coroner in a morgue, broadly built, head shaven and heavily tattooed, daylighting as an artist who paints morbid and “terrifying” cadaverous forms. The vowel substitution across their names suggests a state of twinning, a cracked mirror dropped between them.
The macabre register announces itself from the outset. We find Masha with a plastic bag tied around her head, her breathing laboured. Misha, elsewhere, inspects a corpse with stoically professional, desensitised efficiency. “I’ve autopsied what amounts to a small cemetery,” he admits later. The couple’s early encounters are predicated on serious topics: isolation, depression and suicide attempts. There is no meet-cute, but a broader tactile imagery. The usual fondling in the park is replaced by somewhat tender demonstrations of postmortem procedure: how to expose a skull and rip out a tongue, as if it were an exam. The naturally novice performances are blank and straightforward, which forecloses the viewer’s desire for identification, but is designed, in the directors’ words, to pitch together “two people who would never meet in real life.”
Still, this movie stages a useful experiment in melding the granite of real life with the rainbow of invention. DP Mikhail Khursevich supplies some neat visuals: phone screens, scooter lights, neon clubs, close-up zooms of pale, wriggling gastropods (title nudge). Masha’s face and body, particularly, are probed by the camera, providing a refracted viewership of the agency and her potential Chinese employers, who see her exclusively as a transactional commodity. This plotline shares some thematic kinship with last year’s Golden Leopard winner Toxic (2024), which depicted two 13-year-olds navigating the exploitative modelling industry in a Lithuanian enclave. That cinematic approach, while more conventional, was probably more successful.
Bubbling beneath the unlikely romance is a wider concern with contemporary politics. Belarus has its own authoritarian strongman, Aleksandr Lukashenko, after all, and the twisted fusion of global economics, mob mentality and state disapproval appears destined to separate our star-crossed pair. Masha is an obviously ethereal presence, whose characterisation follows a folkloric lineage of “magicians, fortune-tellers, and witches.” The massage parlour she visits is shot as if it were a site of exorcism, existing to expel what is deemed demonic and possessed. Misha, meanwhile, is the doomed portraitist, misunderstood in his time and thwarted by circumstance. The film argues that theirs is ultimately a symbolic connection, rendered possible in slime.
Joseph Owen, occasional film critic, is a research fellow at the University of Southampton.