Despite some poor (and some exaggerated) reviews I'd rate this film as solid. it captures a subtle but distinctive aspect of it's setting (which for one witless reviewer's benefit is somewhere in Siberia at the beginning of the Cold War. The large round structures you see are radar domes.) The film takes place on the frontier where two furtive native women try to survive by avoiding 'civilised people.' The way the natives live, preserving their own way of live contrasts dramatically with the totalitarian Soviet Union who try to wipe them out to claim the land for themselves. "We had to follow orders" explains Sean Bean, a reluctant member of a work unit forced at gunpoint to obey the state.
I never get that connected with this film but overdramatising it would spoil the unique way the director expresses the region it takes place in. It's just as much about the far north and the conflict between the ways of life of the natives who've found a harsh but at the same time comfortable way of living in their environment and the outsiders trying to take it over for purposes that exist outside it's scope, as it is about the relationships and tensions of the characters who live there.
