Repentance review – dreamlike satire from Soviet Georgia brings life to Stalinist ghosts

1980s black comedy unravels the brutal legacy of a despot who is as ludicrous as his crimes are appalling

The sense of an ending is what this fascinating film delivers: an unimaginably painful ending and the moral reckoning that has to follow. This dreamlike satire from Georgian film-maker Tengiz Abuladze, was made in 1984 but suppressed for three years before release. This was not so much for its coded critique of Stalinism – of which the Soviet authorities had long since learned to parrot their regretful disapproval – but of the pusillanimous loyalty to the Stalinist memory that persisted in the USSR for generations, and the taboo that even then forbade serious reassessment of Stalinist crimes and exhumation of its buried horror. Now Repentance is revived and its strange theatricality and madness are more disturbing than ever.

Partly a bizarre parable, it is an absurdist social-surrealist attack on power and state violence. Like Blue Mountains, made at about the same time by Abuladze’s fellow Georgian Eldar Shengelaia, it is an eerie premonition of the Soviet empire’s complete collapse, just years away. But the tone of icy ironic detachment is swept away in the film’s closing section by a howl of real emotional horror and anguish – and it is then that the movie’s title begins to make sense.

In present day Georgia (that is, the 1980s), we witness the solemn funeral of one Varlam Aravidze (Avtandhil Makharadze), a smalltown mayor and blackshirted party apparatchik whose bullying reign of terror created a legacy of fear which his surviving victims and complicit politicians are trying to convert into a kind of earnest sorrow. The obsequies are attended by his uneasy middle-aged son Abel (also played by Makharadze) and the deceased’s grandson Tornike (Merab Ninidze). But the town is horrified when Aravidze’s corpse is dug up in protest by a local woman called Keti (Zeinab Botsvadze), who leaves the mouldering body posed out in the open like a zombie-waxwork parody of Soviet statuary, an undead reminder of tyranny. The body is reburied but she finds a way to dig it up: the return of the repressed.