A civil war rages across a vast, seemingly unpopulated landscape. As men fight and die, a mute woman searches for her son who has been kidnapped by child organ traffickers. She is accompanied by ‘the Steppenwolf’, a reformed ex-convict now hardened into a ruthless investigator. They resemble a bloody odd couple, but are determined to see their mission through, removing every obstacle – most of them human – in their path.

Following the success of Assault (IFFR 2022), prolific filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov returns with Steppenwolf, his fifteenth feature in twelve years. Maintaining his signature absurdist touch, Steppenwolf stands as a testament to his prowess, skillfully interweaving classic elements from Westerns (with John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956, a key inspiration) road movies and revenge dramas. Yerzhanov's mastery lies in reducing these genres to their elemental core, presenting them in a clean-cut manner, almost resembling the structure of a video game – shoot, get treasure, repeat. This film is his most stylised, visually arresting and genre-defying work to date and as before, he doesn’t hold back on violence: it is bloody, furious and copious. Formally striking, Yerzhanov makes the most of the breathtaking landscape the action unfolds across, its beauty contrasting with the film’s bloodier elements, whose impact might be unbearable had Yerzhanov not leavened it with humour, albeit of the darkest kind.