Crew
Director – Oleksii Taranenko, Screenplay – Yaroslav Wojtseshek, Producer – Irina Kostyuk, Photography – Vyacheslav Rakovsky, Music – Oleksandr Chorny, Special Effects Supervisor – Ilya Lukin, Makeup Effects – Olena Sements, Production Design – Volodymyr Romanov. Production Company – Film UA.
Cast
Marina Koshkina (Maryna Yarovenko), Volodymyr Raschuk (Roman ‘Bumblebee’ Porniichuk), Andriy Zhyla (Vladimir Karlov), Oleksandr Yatsentyuk (Monk), Dmytro Pavko (Wind Yarovenko), Mikhaylo Dziuba (Vakula), Andriy Podlesnyy (Sheva), Ostap Orest Pasichnyk (Boom), Sergey Denha (Boris Karlov), Irina Kudashova (Violet), Oleksandra Pankova (Konotop Witch)
Plot
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Dam, exposing territories that had been buried underwater for seventy years. Soldiers out in the field are now approached by a woman. Bumblebee recognises her as Maryna Yarovenko, who he knew from school back in Donetsk. She is searching for her brother Wind, a soldier who has gone missing. She has psychic hunches that indicate that her brother is still alive. Command permits Bumblebee and his team to accompany her in search of Wind. They descend down into the Kakhovka Facility, an old abandoned Soviet experimental laboratory. They encounter zombies and other creatures lurking in the tunnels. They then meet Russian scientist Vladimir Karlov who tells them about the experiments that were intended to create a super-solder but instead turned the men into zombies while giving the women psychic powers.
The Dam comes with the instant selling pitch of ‘the first Ukrainian zombie film.’ I have never come across a Ukrainian horror film before, although a little bit of internet research indicates they do exist. This gives it a certain novelty selling point. Not to mention it was shot during the midst on the ongoing war between Russian and Ukraine that began with the Russian invasion of 2022.
When you get past the novelty of the selling point, you have to look at The Dam on its own terms. There is an undeniable familiarity to its material. The Dam starts out as being a regular Zombie Film. The whole plot of the soldiers venturing down into an abandoned bunker of zombies in Eastern Europe was conducted in Outpost (2007) – zombies leftover from Nazi experiments there, leftovers from Soviet experiments here.
However, by the halfway point, The Dam has turned into something quite different. It never quite leaves the zombie film aspects behind – it is there as a constant threat in the background – but the story becomes dominated by the Psychic Powers element with lead Marina Koshkina displaying various powers and other creatures in the facility being able to create illusion and Mind Control tricks as a result of the Soviet experiments. In these sections, I kept being reminded more of something like the Australian film Crawlspace (2012).
The single most terrifying creation that the film comes up with is the Konotop Witch, a giant bulky woman in Soviet military uniform with a face dominated by a split vertical maw of a mouth who stomps though, vomiting black ichor into people’s mouths that turns them into mind-controlled slaves. She deserves a film all to herself.
In being made by Ukraine right in the midst of the war with Russia, it is no particular surprise that The Dam doesn’t have a very high view of the Russians. It lays into the Soviets and fires off a number of lines at a failed system and people who blindly adhere to its views. In fact, you could say that by this point, it now treats the Soviets the same way that Nazis were treated by B movies.
Trailer here