April: dread inhabits every frame of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s brilliant abortion drama

It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April – only her second film, after Beginning announced the arrival of a new visionary in 2020. The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief. April might be the cruellest month, but in Kulumbegashvili’s Georgia, for Kulumbegashvili’s women, all the months are cruel.

The dread is in everything, in the leaves and the wind and the clear water gurgling over the stones of the riverbed, and most especially it is in that strange figure that suddenly exists in one corner of the frame, a naked, ancient thing, definitely a woman, definitely a monster, with wasting flesh hanging down in folds from a grotesquely featureless face. The figure is never explained, but listen carefully to the children’s bright voices chattering incongruously on the soundtrack, and connect them to a story told later of two young sisters playing in the mud of the riverbank, and you might begin to form an idea – one that, like all of Kulumbegashvili’s sly, sidelong ideas, is more felt (or perhaps feared) than reasoned. And listen, in particular, to the breathing, that omnipresent sonic motif, a slow, in-out wheezing sigh that comes from the nightmare figure on screen, but is also inside your own ears, coming from inside your own throat.

For a filmmaker so exquisitely precise in the design and choreography of her visuals (courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, who also shot Beginning, as well as Bones and All, the 2022 film directed by April producer Luca Guadagnino), Kulumbegashvili relies to an eerie degree on sound designer Lars Ginzel’s aural landscapes and Matthew Herbert’s strange, spare score, to carry the import of a scene. In a hospital delivery room a live birth is in progress, and not one for the squeamish (it’s a real woman giving real birth to a real baby, a remarkable scene that is the fruit of Kulumbegashvili’s decision to embed herself in a working maternity ward as research). But only a quick mutter from the attending doctor, and the total silence of the newborn, tell us something is wrong. Then, with a radical, destabilising cut, we are in the long, cold corridor of the hospital where the obstetrician, Nina (another fathomless performance by Beginning’s Ia Sukhitashvili), is waiting to be called in to answer to the livid, grieving father’s accusations of malpractice.

In her superior’s off ice, in a shot arranged so that three men – hospital boss, investigating doctor and bereaved father – are stacked up on the right hand side, dwarfing Nina on the left, Nina is under suspicion not so much due to the easily explained irregularities in the delivery of the stillborn child, as because of her reputation as an abortionist. Out of a sense of compassion that is surprising in one so hard-edged and unsmiling, she performs illicit terminations for local women and girls who need to keep the procedure a secret, usually from their male partners. 

Abortion is just about legal in Georgia, with heavy restrictions that seem to be multiplying recently. But even beyond these legal curtailments, religiosity and patriarchy combine, especially in poorer, remote areas, to make it a cause for biblical shame and occasionally equally biblical punishment. (A sad but perhaps unsurprising footnote is that April has yet to be screened in Georgia, and it’s unclear whether it ever will be.) In this environment, it’s easy to imagine how the figure of the abortionist might have become villainised to an almost mythical degree, and how someone like Nina might have internalised those judgements and buried them deep beneath the brisk, decisive, pragmatic exterior that her chosen profession demands.

And so, in the inverse of the birth scene, there is an even more unflinching, if far less graphic sequence in which Nina performs a mercy abortion on the daughter of a downtrodden neighbour. It is just one locked-off, abstract shot but the effect is transfixing, forcing us to register sensory details like the rustling of the crude plastic sheet that has turned a kitchen table into an operating theatre, or the tiny elastic marks on the mother’s forearm where she’s rolled up her sweater sleeve to better bear down on her daughter’s squirming torso. It isn’t merely physical discomfort that is evoked; the girl is mute and developmentally challenged, which introduces questions of consent and agency not just around her sexual activity but also around this very termination. Just as in Beginning, which contains a rape scene of horrifyingly pastoral, wide-angle composure, as well as an excruciatingly extended sequence of the protagonist playing dead in a forest, in April Kulumbegashvili’s brutal formalism and intellectual rigour contribute to a feminism fraught with agonising, self-conscious contradiction, which provides no glib, easy answers about sisterhood or solidarity.

Indeed, what even motivates Nina to continue this career-threatening practice – when, as someone remarks, “No one will thank you and no one will defend you” – is one of April’s many mysteries. Another is Nina’s own attitude to intimacy and sex, exemplified by her stoic reaction when a grubby hook-up turns abruptly violent and later, by her alien, untender gaze at a sleeping lover, at the crook of his thigh, the stirrup of his abdomen, the curve of his penis.

Whether looking at her lover, or at one of her patients, or out over poppy fields and marigolds, seeing the countryside buzzing, barking and blossoming to life in the season of renewal and regeneration, Sukhitashvili’s titanic performance of inner conflict and bone-chilling loneliness lets us understand the true depths of the film’s excoriatingly intelligent despair. 

For all her rebellion and acts of resistance, the very existence of that wheezing deformity within Nina, that thing that lives inside her that got paralysed with fright and helplessness beside a muddy bank years ago and never got free, represents the final triumph of the malignant, invisible but ubiquitous force that is patriarchal oppression. The most monstrous thing that a monster can do is make you believe that the monster is you.

► April is in UK cinemas now.