‘Dau’ Review: After 20 Years of Production, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Infamous Mega-Project Comes to a Screeching Halt

At long last we get the definitive chapter of cinema's wildest project, carved from a living simulation of a Soviet town.

After 20 years, “the movie set that ate itself” finally regurgitates its supreme form: a cacophonous, repetitive biopic about Greek-born Soviet physicist Lev Landau (Teodor Currentzis). The three-and-half-hour feature is actually the 14 of its kind — alongside several series and other installations — carved from the sprawling mega-production by director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, whose fully-functioning corner of mid-century Moscow worked day and night, for years on end. As an immersive art project rife with allegations of abuse, the story of its making is notorious, and morbidly fascinating. As a straightforward movie, it’s more Fizzle than Tsar Bomba.

Simply titled “Dau” — as opposed to sibling features “DAU. Natasha” and “DAU. Degeneration,” which premiered at Berlin in 2020 — the Venice competition entry is along the lines of what Khrzhanovsky first envisioned before pivoting to a Soviet “Truman Show.” And yet, it rarely feels like a film that can be viewed outside its experimental context, in part because Khrzhanovsky’s camera so frequently leaves its lead characters to focus on the background and environment.

This is, of course, in keeping with one of the movie’s major themes: Lenin’s promise of Marxist utopia, and its curdling into a Big Brother state. The tale of any historical figure is also one of time and place, but despite these looming ideas, the film’s particular unspooling has a distracting quality. Its core aesthetic ideas are visible on the surface during its four-decade narrative, but they rarely cohere to conjure intrigue or dramatic rigor.

Currentzis, an orchestral conductor, embodies Landau with awkwardness that veers into unpredictable vitality, which is matched by a chaotic series of sounds and images when “Dau” first begins. It’s off-putting because it’s meant to be, but as this flourish re-occurs, it rarely grounds the audience within a legible sense of psychology or mood (à la the nightmarish visions in fellow nuclear biopic “Oppenheimer,” for comparison). It’s loud and brash, much like the production itself, which has drawn fascination and ire in equal measure. Then again, so did Landau, who, in the movie’s telling, remains torn between his scientific ethics and his Soviet duty when it comes to using his genius to build nuclear weapons.

His principled debates with aged mentor Pytor Kryupitsa (theatre director Anatoly Vasiliev) drive much of this plot, though they rarely feature dramatic variation each time they recur. What’s different about each conversation is that it’s staged in a different, eye-popping location, like atop a cage-like grid, or along a nearly 45-degree slope. “Dau” has all the detail and weighty celluloid texture of a grand historical drama. It’s always interesting to look at — though not necessary to engage with. You can accuse Khrzhanovsky of a lot, but not of lacking a photographic eye. But whether that eye is cinematic is a different matter.

In practice, the actual drama is alternatingly lathered and spread thin across the movie’s runtime. Much of it concerns Landau’s relationship with eventual wife Nora, played by actress and TV presenter Radmila Schegoleva. Among the movie’s many multi-disciplinary performers, she creates a lively, complicated dynamic with Currentzis bordering on violent furor and paving the way for illicit affairs. The story’s improvised feel creates wildly naturalistic scenes of romance gone awry, but these sensations come at a cost. Although “Dau” is awash in the spectacle of scale, it seldom features coherent composition — stemming, perhaps, from its freewheeling, spontaneous methods.

If the camera captures some hint of great performance, it usually feels accidental. This is its own kind of magic, but it’s also rare. Much of the time, you’re left to put up with untrained screen actors not knowing where to stand or look, or who don’t know not to block the camera’s view with flailing hands. If Khrzhanovsky’s goal was re-creating social and cultural conditions to capture drama at its purest, then the result merely proves Hitchcock’s refrain that drama is life with dull bits cut out.

Which is not to say that “Dau” doesn’t occasionally succeed. In staging a faux surveillance state, where thousands of extras lived under watchful eyes and even informed on one another, Khrzhanovsky weaves a fabric of indifference and complicity into his backdrop, with actors keeping their heads down as enormous, often violent events unfold right in front of them. In scenes of interrogation, when KGB operatives force Landau’s loved ones to turn against him, a palpable sense of tension enters the room. Eventually, by the time the story reaches the 1950s, and Landau is visited by a friend released from prison, that same atmosphere follows him home, in the form of minor interactions tinged with an air of paranoia.

And yet, this can’t help but constitute damning “Dau” with faint praise. These moments are fleeting. They make up but minor fractions of the movie’s gargantuan runtime, which, although it finds a perfectly symbolic ending, also dares to launch into an extended epilogue to hammer home points already made ad nauseam. While there’s a certain allure to seeing what becomes of a real world “Synecdoche, New York,” the movie never justifies all the hubbub, meandering through scenes that feel strung together more by chance than intention.

“It’s very distressing to know that you’re not god,” Landau muses at one point. It’s hard not to wonder if the movie’s all-powerful, all-seeing director feels the same way about his creation, now that it’s no longer something he can manipulate and control.

Grade: C

“Dau” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.