Saturday Solutions - Вий

There is seemingly no hurry to provide the solution to yesterday's question, so let's go back several days to Monday's mystery movie. Because i'm going to spoil an aspect of the movie to talk about why i like it, part of this post will be continued on a separate page for easy avoidance.

Here's a scaled down compilation of the 10 screen shots presented in the previous post:

This movie is the 5th film version of Nikolai Gogol's book (the 4th Russian/Soviet film, there's also a Korean movie adaptation) The book was first published back in 1835, and the first film version was a 1909 silent adaptation, now lost. The book has also influenced other movies (such as Mario Bava's Black Sunday), music, and even video games.
So, what is it called?

Viy (2014) is more often found as Forbidden Empire internationally.

Parts of the book, including the titular demon, Viy, are taken from Gogol's tale, with a new narrative intersecting the old tale. To bring us outsiders into the fantasy world of the novel, we travel with Johnathan Green, a mapmaker with a dream - to establish his hometown of Greenwich as the baseline by which the world is measured. Even our 'normal' person isn't quite from our world, however.
Note that he drives his carriage from the inside, via his own semi-steampunk technology...

...he has a distance mapping wheel of his own design mounted behind the carriage...

...and his own special tech developed for his mapping work -

The patently ridiculous notion of Johnathan Green's goal of mapping the globe to establish the Greenwich Meridian via a carriage with a distance tracking wheel is likely a product of the transliteration process, adapting the story to the western audience while translating to English. It makes much more sense when you realize that our protagonist is based on Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French cartographer who first mapped and recorded the culture of the Ukrainian territories. The whole notion works a lot better when no oceans are involved.

I enjoyed the movie's visuals and rich atmospherics quite a bit. The story was both simple to follow and tangled enough to be interesting. Apparently, enough people agreed with me to put a sequel into production.
But, to talk about what i liked best will spoil part of the plot, at least on a general basis. So, if you don't want that to happen, don't follow the link to the rest of this post. Just go find the movie and enjoy. You can always come back here later, eh?



Okay - spoiler time.

What i really enjoyed most about the film was the twist that it's basically a Scooby-Doo story with the unmasking of who's faking the supernatural hijinks - but it's set in the middle of world where real supernatural spookiness is going on all around the fake stuff.
For example, there's these zombie-rat-dogs that chase his carriage into the village-

Not exactly normal critters, no?

While the movie was entertaining and the visuals enthralling, it's the subversion of convention that really made me like the film. I'll definitely be back for the next one.
Just like these guys...

screens from Вий aka Viy aka Forbidden Empire (2014)