On demand: "Siberia"

To put it bluntly, Siberia is writer-director Abel Ferrara and star Willem Dafoe getting into some shit. Billed as "an exploration into the language of dreams" - and as Scooby-Doo would say, ruh-roh - it opens with Dafoe recounting a memory (Ferrara's own?) of his father taking his six-year-old self on a fishing expedition in the icy Canadian wilderness, during which the husky dogs started nipping at his toes. Dogs keep cropping up in these 90 minutes, both as motif and recurring nightmare. Sometimes they're seen fulfilling a purpose as sled-pullers. Sometimes they're heard but not seen, howling offscreen. Every so often, one slips its leash and goes for somebody's throat. The film itself is very much a stray, an extended fugue that follows Dafoe's manfully named Clint, a bartender who's exiled himself in a snow-covered valley, as he saddles up his own huskies and sets out into the darker corners of a world that encompasses murder, genocide, castration, ugly bouts of death metal and multiple selves. We are, in short, being led by a gnarled hand into the least compromising of modern American filmmakers' fantasies, with no map or compass to reassure us. I'd advise you to bring waterproofed clothing, stout walking shoes, and perhaps some Kendal Mint Cake to sustain you during Siberia's rockier stretches. 

For a while, those fantasies seem perilously banal and familiar: in the opening moments, Clint has it away with a pregnant woman who walks into his bar, handily if improbably naked under her coat. (She is literally all fur coat and no knickers.) As our protagonist sets out on his long dark night of the soul, it's evident Ferrara subscribes to an idea of the creative as a solitary male figure, passing into a coldly indifferent landscape in search of answers, inspiration, anything. I had two immediate issues with this: one, Dafoe on a dogsled bears an unintended resemblance to Jean-Claude van Damme in those Coors ads; and two, Ferrara has been more prolific this past decade than he ever was at the start of his career. The landscape really can't be that indifferent if he's getting the money and greenlight to make a movie as personal, difficult and non-commercial as this. Still, we plough on, and soon enter properly captivating territory. Shot by Stefano Falivene on location in Germany, Mexico and Italy, Siberia boasts some of the most compelling landscapes - and most accomplished mixing-and-matching of landscapes (mountains, deserts, forests) - as the cinema has showcased in some while. (It's a pity that after taking a bow at last year's London Film Festival, the film has bypassed UK cinemas to debut on subscription streaming.)

What Siberia resembles above all else is a latter-day Malick movie that's had its airy spirituality excised with a flick knife; left behind is a world as craggy and shadowy as the leading man's face, a universe that seems forever on the verge of apocalypse, either too cold or burning up. (Do artists have other temperatures?) It extends to a Brueghelian vision of men young and old being stripped and shot in the head, but also the sight of Dafoe dancing around a maypole in a pair of Ugg boots, an oddly funny idea of a happy place. (Funny because you can't ever imagine Ferrara going there, even in sensible footwear.) The material remains almost wilfully problematic: there's next to no filter between what's on the director's mind and what's been put on the screen. (The script has the ring of a first draft, and it's indicative of Dafoe's humanising skill that Siberia clears that hurdle.) The women who flit across these frames are either crones or shapeshifting, oft-naked temptresses; a nude performer with dwarfism is rolled on in a wheelchair as a character billed as The Demon. There may be a reason Ferrara has been working out of Italy, politically incorrect sanctuary of the guilt-ridden auteur: one suspects you'd have a hard time signing him up for a sensitivity-training seminar. His new film is very male, at the last: the work of a son trying to process the loss of his parents, bound up in the kind of trauma and grief that tends to be more successfully worked through on the psychiatrist's couch than it does on the cinema screen. Still, few filmmakers have confronted that loss so frontally, with such little apparent hesitancy about seeming obtuse, incoherent, perverse or dickish. Towards the end of his long day's journey into night, our protagonist encounters a Christ-like figure who counsels him to "be human: fuck up, shake your ass". Clutching that particular maxim firmly to its dark heart, Siberia emerges - believe it or not - as Ferrara's very own Field of Dreams: grubbier, grimier, more lived-in and fucked-up, naturally - but just about as riskily human as anything else in this singular filmography.

Siberia is now available for BFI Player subscribers to stream.