Qas (2022)
★★★★ — Qas (2022)
There's a shot early in Qas that had me completely hooked before the story had even properly begun. A lone rider. A carriage. An endless, indifferent wilderness stretching out in every direction. That's all it takes sometimes. Give me wide open landscape, give me a figure dwarfed by it, give me a score that feels like cold wind through a cracked door, and I am absolutely yours.
This is my A-Z World Movie Tour stop for Kazakhstan, and what a stop it turned out to be. Set during the catastrophic famine that tore through the country in the 1930s, Qas doesn't need to announce its bleakness. It just shows it to you. The colour palette does half the storytelling on its own. Greys and beiges, like the land itself has been drained of anything worth having. And then night falls, and your whole world shrinks to the orange glow of a campfire and a wall of total darkness pressing in from every side. It's an extraordinary visual choice, and it works completely.
The story follows a gravedigger and his younger brother, travelling together towards a place called Sarkand, which has the reputation of a haven. A destination that promises something better. You know from the atmosphere alone that the journey won't be simple, but the direction this film takes is not quite what you'd expect.
Out on the road, they encounter an old hermit. And this is where Qas shifts gears in a way that genuinely caught me off guard. What starts as a period survival drama quietly, almost imperceptibly, becomes a psychological horror. The old man has this aura of menace that the film never fully explains, and that's exactly the right call. He keeps appearing. At every turn, there he is. Watching. Waiting. Stalking the edges of the frame. I found myself genuinely asking whether he was even real, or whether what we were seeing was hunger delirium twisting a desperate man's perception. The film is content to leave that question hanging, and I loved it for that.
What really floored me technically is how the director manages to make these vast, open plains feel suffocating. You're looking at an enormous landscape with nowhere to hide, and somehow the claustrophobia is overwhelming. That's a genuinely difficult trick to pull off, and it's done here with real confidence. It reminded me a little of what I felt watching The Long Walk (2025), that same sense of being trapped inside a huge space, of geography offering no comfort whatsoever.
And then they reach Sarkand. I won't say more than that, except that the contrast between what they find there and the brutal effort of everything that came before it is a proper gut punch. The kind that sits with you after the credits roll. The kind that makes you stare at the wall for a minute.
Four stars. This is a brilliant film, and I mean that without any qualification. If you have any interest in world cinema, in survival stories told with visual intelligence and genuine dread, seek this one out. It's not an easy watch, but it earns every difficult moment.
I'll be looking up more from this director. When a filmmaker can make emptiness feel this threatening, I want to see everything else they've done.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-07-04
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