Young Critics Lab

23 décembre 2025

White Snail: A Meditation of Life and Death

By Noah Zoratti

In its “Hauteur” section, Les Arcs presents the narrative debut of Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter. The duo is already well-established in documentary filmmaking, having directed Space Dogs and its follow-up Dreaming Dog. Their latest film – which premiere at the Locarno Film Festival turned more than a few heads – centers on the encounter between two young Belarusians from very different backgrounds yet united by their shared sensitivity to life’s fragility and impermanence. 

Masha is a young model, ethereal and vampire-like, whose unique appearance is further accentuated by the black umbrella she uses to shield herself from the sun. She dreams of working in China and navigates the highly competitive modeling world with meticulous attention to self-care and body weight. Beneath all this discipline, however, Masha harbors a fragile and precarious mental state. When she’s not attending modeling school or recording self-tape auditions, she wanders the streets of Minsk at night, observing nocturnal routines of Misha, an assistant at the municipal morgue. 

Misha is 20 years her senior, physically imposing and seemingly aggressive, with black tattoos and a bulky frame. Yet this exterior conceals a tender, almost naïve interior. An unexpected bond forms between them, rooted in shared fascination with death, which manifests itself in gestures that are both tender and extreme. He expresses it through large, gory and surreal canvases; she pushes her own body to the limit through asphyxiation practices, frequently landing in hospital to her mother’s despair.

Set against the backdrop of peripheral Minsk that feels empty and frozen in time, with references to the war at the Belarus-Ukraine border, the film is both melancholic and oppressive. The pervasive greyness seems to function as a fragile defense against the inevitability of the future, reflecting the uncertain state of the character’s lives.

The camerawork retains the documentary-style restraint typical of Kremser and Peter’s work. Often, it follows the two protagonists from behind as they wander through silent nights, their proximity never articulated outright. As we accompany them though empty streets, dimly lit apartments and sterile morgue rooms, we bear witness to their tentative gestures of care and contemplation. The fluid relationship that gradually emerges between them remains undefined and unnamed. Two solitudes that ultimately recognize themselves in one another. 

In many ways, the film mirrors the lived realities of the actors, Marya Imbro and Mikhail Senkov. A model and a morgue worker in real life, they were selected through a process that mimicked casting for documentary, with the intention of having them play fictionalized versions of themselves. Together, they create a portrait of rare tenderness and authenticity, stumbling upon their own emotions and visibly grappling with each other’s quiet hesitations. The intimacy they create on screen enables the film to depict human warmth and vulnerability within an otherwise cold and austere world. The differences between Masha and Misha extend beyond their personalities to the spaces they inhabit. 

The score by John Gürtler and Lan Miserre moves between fairy-tale orchestral passages led by swelling strings and more attenuated motifs that surface during moments of quiet introspection. This register intensifies during a pilgrimage to locations tied to Misha’s past, steeped in legends and myths. In contrast, Masha’s world is neon-lit, buzzing with pop music and off-key karaoke. 

The film’s power lies in its contrasts, as it paints a clear, non-judgmental portrait of a country caught between waiting and flight, inhabited by people suspended in limbo. But it is precisely where that sense of who we are, and what we might become, is often lost. “They are not terrifying. Life is,” says Misha of his paintings, a line that seems to encapsulate the underlying intent of Kremser and Peter. Though the film departs from a premise that could easily become unsettling, it instead stages a delicate dance in the purgatory of existence. It is a work that explores how two individuals attempt to comprehend one another while navigating the shadowed terrain of their own mortality.