Venice Reviews 'Dau': Impressive Spectacle, Thin Drama — SkimNews
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- Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 'Dau' premiered in the Venice Film Festival's main competition, weighing just over 200 minutes (excluding a quarter-hour interval) and spanning four decades in the life of a physicist involved in the Soviet atom-bomb project.
- Teodor Currentzis, the Greek-Russian musician, plays the fictionalized protagonist Dau — inspired by Nobel-winning physicist Lev Landau — across 1928 Leningrad, mid-1930s Kharkiv, and late-1930s Moscow settings.
- "The Brutalist" Oscar-winning cinematographer Lol Crawley is one of three DPs credited on the film, which the Variety review compares to "Oppenheimer" and "The Brutalist" as a single-tortured-man portrait of historical turmoil.
- The DAU project was conceived as a quasi-"Truman Show" experiment in which participants lived and worked full-time on a 24/7 set spanning 12,000 square meters, though allegations of physical and psychological abuse on set have surfaced prominently.
- Venice festival brass defended programming the film on political grounds, citing renewed timeliness of its themes of Russian state oppression following Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
- The Variety review judges 'Dau' "dramatically and rhetorically thin" beneath its jaw-dropping production design, concluding that Khrzhanovsky's own description — that the films are "mere trailers for the larger project" — applies here as well.
Why it matters: Venice's choice to platform a 200-minute auteur epic mired in abuse allegations — paired with Variety's verdict that spectacle outshines drama — sharpens the festival's ethical tightrope between championing ambitious work and condoning its production methods. With Khrzhanovsky himself conceding these films are trailers, the real DAU product remains the untried 12,000-square-meter installation.
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