Abel Ferrara is teaming up with Willem Dafoe once again! The dynamic duo behind “Tommaso” and “Pasolini” have done it again with the upcoming Berlin Film Festival-bound film “Siberia,” and there’s even a trailer for it ahead of its festival premiere on February 24.
The trailer comes from IndieWire, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking of “Mandy” after watching it. Not only does the nightmarish landscapes and visuals, as well as the metal-heavy score in the trailer bring to mind the Panos Cosmatos movie, but Nicolas Cage and even Isabelle Huppert were scheduled to start in the film back in 2016 before apparently being replaced, or at least being very well hidden from the trailer and even the cast list from the Berlin Film Festival website.
As for the film itself, it shows Dafoe on a life-changing journey across haunting set pieces and meeting all kinds of mysterious, almost sinister figures, while also being confronted by a woman laughingly telling him that he destroyed her life. According to the official synopsis of the film:
“A man flees from one world to another that is strange and cold. Furs and fires keep him warm; a cave serves as his shelter. He is a broken man who wants to be alone. But even isolation does not bring him inner peace. Once again, he goes on a journey, this time into the self. He explores his dreams, confronts memories and seeks out visions. The rare encounters with other people are in languages he does not speak, determined by bodies that fascinate him, and by types of love he explores and then loses. His journey becomes a dance with demons, but time and again it flares up: light. In cinema history there have been many attempts to portray the mythical as something intimate, and the radical as a personal journey. But there is only one artist who is as wildly anarchistic, metaphysically mysterious, and at the same time god-obsessed and fanatical about the truth: Abel Ferrara, joining forces here once again with his acting alter ego, Willem Dafoe. While his previous film Tommaso explored the way desire plays out in families, in Siberia the (male) ego abandons all semblance of everyday life in a tumultuous montage. To expose and discover himself.”
See? Not that different from “Mandy” though there’s less of a chance of seeing Willem Dafoe in a chainsaw fight. That being said, we’re still excited for the return of the Ferrara/Dafoe dynamic duo.
See the trailer for “Siberia” below:
