White Snail: From the Superficial to the Lifeless
White Snail, which received double awards at the 78th Locarno Film Festival (Special Jury Prize and the Pardo for Best Performance), explores the relationship to the body, to life, and to death through the intertwined paths of a model and a man who works in a morgue.
Masha, a trainee model with suicidal inclinations, is drawn—by a morbid curiosity—to meet Misha, a morgue worker who, at first glance, inspires no trust. Yet his pleasure in describing and imagining post-mortem surgical procedures on living bodies, as well as his paintings—where sensuality merges with mutilated, disemboweled corpses in golden-hued orgies—serves as a cathartic outlet for the evil he sees as intrinsic to all life. Masha and Misha are thus cast as opposites, not only in their professions but also physically: he is stocky, tattooed; she is tall and thin, with translucent, immaculate skin that she shields from the sun with a large black umbrella. What unites them, however, is solitude.
Masha’s loneliness is laid bare from the opening sequence: In a carefully composed shot that already feels staged for the protagonist herself, she is starved of attention and affection, abandoned by a father who left for Poland (while she lives, in precarious conditions, in Belarus with her mother), and rejected by the other models at her school. Around her neck is a plastic bag in which she breathes with difficulty. Beyond suicide attempts, the suffering she endures is never truly expressed in her interactions with others, nor is it ever genuinely acknowledged. When her classmates question her about her condition, she minimizes it; she refuses the questionable help of a mother who sends her to an exorcist; she hides her suicidal thoughts from Misha—though paradoxically, he is the only person with whom existence seems lighter.
An ephemeral presence in the neon-colored night streets of Minsk, Masha exists only through her image, which she enjoys curating on social media. And as if mastering her own image weren’t enough, she seeks to manipulate others to serve her own interests—and her perversity: in her first meeting with Misha, she claims to be searching for her father’s corpse to gain entry to the morgue; she pretends to drown so that he acts against his convictions (while she, cynically, believes in nothing); she seemingly contributes, the film suggests, to his dismissal from his job—just as she leaves for China without looking back. He was merely a fleeting distraction to her, and she leaves an emotional void behind. More than modeling itself, White Snail addresses what modeling implies about the body—and about death. To meet imposed standards and a beauty untouched by time and life, Masha vacates her own body, which is visually likened—through makeup sessions and the image of her face covered by a plastic bag—to the corpses that Misha tends to.
The jury’s decision to award the Pardo for Best Performance to the duo of Marya Imbro and Mikhail Senkov is entirely warranted, as their acting is both subtle and complementary—even though the non-professional actors did not meet before shooting, in accordance with the wishes of Austrian filmmakers Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter. After two documentary features (Space Dogs and Dreaming Dogs), this marks their first fiction film. Yet the documentary essence remains deeply embedded in the work—not only through the nearly simultaneous on-screen encounter between the characters and the actors, but also through the real-life parallels between performers and roles (Mikhail Senkov is the artist behind the paintings and previously worked as a morgue assistant; Marya Imbro is a model and struggles with depression). This extension of reality into fiction contributes to the film’s power, as it dissolves the boundaries between them—just as it brings life, in its most artificial forms, closer to death. As if, in order to live more fully, one must first confront the inevitability of one’s own end.
Sabrina Schwob
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025