Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s deliriously weird The Invisible Fight would be irksome if it weren’t crafted so lovingly and with a charming earnestness. Part wuxia homage, part coming-of-age story, this slice of absurdist historical fiction has little on its mind other than to amuse, which it does regularly enough to stay on the audience’s good side.
The film is set in the Soviet Union circa 1973, with the drabness of life under an authoritarian regime sharply contrasting with the more fulfilling, vibrant existence that our protagonist, Rafael (Ursel Tilk), is chasing after. The young man, who still lives with his mother in a modest apartment, is the only survivor of an attack by three Chinese bandits at the Soviet-Chinese border, where he works as a guard. When his car breaks down one day near a monastery, Rafael, a rebel in search of radicalization, goads the monks and does his best to ingratiate himself into the community despite their protestations, making clear his desire to “become badass at black metal kung fu.” These aren’t just Eastern Orthodox holy men but practiced martial artists. Turns out, their leader, Nafanail (Indrek Samuul), is looking for a successor.
The Invisible Fight’s winning visual gags commence from the outset, when one of the trespassing bandits gleefully dances atop an outstretched rifle of a Soviet soldier before offing him. Unrelenting, they serve to aid Sarnet’s apparent mission to expose the hidden eccentricities or strange underbelly of every character and element of the film’s world.
Sound is a prevailing texture of The Invisible Fight, with sonic choices deployed at an antic clip and tenor that’s almost cartoonish. (We hear bouncy plunks from Rafael’s footsteps when he descends a staircase and little motions or actions are underlined with an echoey “boing!”) As for the music on the soundtrack, it’s divided between Eastern strings and flute music and bursts of Black Sabbath, the latter of which the bandits plays in the first scene and comes to take hold of Rafael, causing him to pass along the metal spirit and songs to the monks. These seemingly antithetical modes of scoring create a jarring friction between old- and new-world culture.
Sitting down for his first meal with the monastery’s inhabitants, Rafael is told that most of the monks are starets gifted with telepathic capabilities and almost all ex-cons. The camera then pans up the table and we glimpse their hard-bitten, goateed faces, suggesting a procession of reformed bikers turned prophets. Every character in Sarnet’s film seems as if they’re ready to unleash their inner freak, except perhaps for Inrinei (Kaarel Pogga), Rafael’s nervous, self-doubting foil and teacher, and Rita (Esther Kuntu), our hero’s love interest. Even though most of the characters here are an amalgam of jokes or quirks, Rita feels particularly thinly drawn, and her dynamic with Rafael doesn’t generate the energy or odd poignancy that it should.
Resonating more than the sometimes spotty characterizations is Nafanail’s compassion and open-mindedness, which deactivates the cliché of a severe religious authority figure. Instead, Nafanail refuses to condemn the sins of others when Inrinei and Rafael use their confessions to try and out each other’s or Rita’s misdeeds. His resolute insistence on seeing God and goodness in everyone is moving and indicative of the film’s too-good-natured-to-fail ethos.
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