By Josh Lewis

“With love to his secrets [and] lies” are among the last words that appear on screen in the bittersweet sophomore effort from Ukrainian writer-director Antonio Lukich. They are in reference to Lukich’s father, a low-level gangster who he has fictionalized through the childhood eyes of twin brothers Kolya (Ramil Nasirov) and Vasya (Amil Nasirov), whose formative memories recall him as a faceless force of strength and problem-solving whenever their juvenile antics required it. However, after decades of abandonment and disappointment, the boys’ admiration of their father becomes more confused. Kolya, now a drug-dealing bus driver living at home, and Vasya, an anxious father and rookie cop who can’t get a promotion due to his brother’s criminal behaviour, begin to realize that all they’ve inherited from their father is fear, debt, and a curse for law-breaking that they get an opportunity to confront when they learn he’s on his deathbed only a short drive away in Luxembourg.

Although his premise screams melodrama, Lukich is smart enough to go against the grain and find bleakly humorous ways to deny the brothers closure at almost every turn. Maybe they won’t get there in time or remember what their father looks like, or maybe the guy in intensive care is a random man they are simply harassing. Whether it’s Kolya having to delay his road trip to channel-surf and make tea for a senior citizen whose hands he broke in an accident, or Vasya being so on edge about not adequately providing for his wife and child that he threatens a toy-store employee at gunpoint over a defective bath toy, Lukich films these events with a disappointed, poisoned sense of nostalgia. A clear longing for the simplicity of boyhood is captured in the dynamic, vibrant energy of the way these brothers move through their world (the camera as untethered as they are when they don their boyish soccer jerseys and Burger King hats). They come to understand that being forced to mature and take responsibility for the unseen, long-term destruction that they know from experience is not easy to forget or forgive.

Josh Lewis