Bakyt (2017)

Let me set the scene. Snow-capped mountains stretching into a pale sky. Vast, open plains that seem to go on forever. A young boy riding bareback across terrain that would make most adults think twice. As an opening impression, Bakyt is genuinely, properly stunning. The camera work here is the kind of stuff that makes you sit up straight and pay attention. Whoever was behind the lens clearly has a real eye, and Kyrgyzstan, it turns out, is an absolutely breathtaking place to set a film. I'd never seen it on screen before, and on that front alone, this short delivered something genuinely fresh.

This was my entry for Kyrgyzstan on my A-Z World Movie Tour, and the first review on Letterboxd for the film, which tells you how obscure we're getting in this project. So fair enough, I wasn't expecting a polished blockbuster. But I was hoping for something that held together from beginning to end. And that's where Bakyt starts to wobble.

The story isn't terrible on paper. A boy, Bakyt, has a horse he clearly loves and has bonded with over years. He rides it without a saddle, which I genuinely found impressive to watch. There's some school-yard business with another boy, a bit of mischief, and it escalates into a challenge: a horse race. It's simple, but that's fine. Some of the best short films in the world are built on simple premises. I was along for the ride.

Then things go sideways. The horse gets stolen. You feel the tension building, or at least you think you do. And then, without a single word of explanation or even a visual hint at how it happened, the horse swims across a lake and turns up safe. Just like that. No context. No scene showing us who took it or why. No drama around the recovery. The horse is just... back. And to make it worse, the footage of Bakyt riding again appears to be the same footage we'd already seen earlier in the short. Recycled. Dropped in to wrap things up.

That's not an ending. That's someone deciding they were done making the film. It left me genuinely baffled, sitting there wondering if I'd missed something, then realising I hadn't. It's just a bad resolution to what could have been a decent little story.

And that's the frustration with Bakyt. You can see the bones of something worthwhile. The relationship between a kid and his horse is a tried and tested emotional anchor, and there are moments where it genuinely works. The riding sequences are joyful to watch, partly because of that extraordinary landscape behind them, and partly because the bareback stuff looks legitimately difficult and impressive. But good-looking footage can only carry you so far when the storytelling collapses in the final stretch.

Visually stunning, narratively broken. That's the honest summary. One and a half stars, and I'm giving the half almost entirely to those mountains.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-28

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