Detours

Something is hiding in the streets of Moscow. Someone is moving and being chased through parks, alleys, sidewalks and nooks and crannies. The empty spaces of the megacity have become places of surveillance and control, but also of clandestinity and furtiveness. Detours proposes an anti-spectacular and rhetoric-deprived journey through a series of everyday scenarios turned into a cat-and-mouse game board between a drug dealer and the (supposed) forces of law and order. Ekaterina Selenkina makes a kind of impassive thriller in which every frame is charged with tension. In Detours it matters as much what we see as what is left out of the frame - or what is implicit, hidden, in each shot. The film maps out an unsuspected urban geography through Alexey Kurbatov's spartan, imaginative and limpid photography and the images of the Dark Web through which the protagonist sells and signals his merchandise. This is one of the films that best reflects the climate of surveillance capitalism in which we are immersed, and how ordinary people are able to devise tactics to circumvent the panoptic strategies that stealthily encircle us. Like any great film, Detours can be understood as a critical radiography of the social (and political?) climate of contemporary Russia, but its discourse becomes more incisive if we apply it to our own context. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH