Whenever you hear the words 'one last job' in films, no matter what part of the world they come from, it's a given that things are not going to go according to plan. Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk sets his debut feature in the Bukovina region of Ukraine on the border with Romania. It's an area the director knows well. His graduation piece, Krasna Malanka (2013), centres on the same New Year festival featured in this film, about to be celebrated when Leonid (whose Pamfir nickname means 'stone') returns home after a spell working in Poland.
He's first seen wearing the traditional carved wooden mask and straw costume that gives him a demonic appearance and shrouds the action in a kind of paganistic realism. But there's no room for fantasy in this grittily unflinching saga that takes a sombre twist when Leonid's teenage son accidentally causes a fire at the church in a bid to destroy the documents that will take his father away again. In agreeing to pay for the damage, however, Leonid breaks a promise made to his pious wife to stop smuggling and brings him into conflict with a corrupt forestry official who fancies himself as an oligarch.
By shooting in sinuous long takes with people bobbing in and out of the frame, Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk invokes Serbian director Emir Kusturica's gambit of plunging viewers into an unfamiliar milieu and leaving them to find their feet while the story unfolds around them. There's much to intrigue in the peripheral plotlines. But the focus falls on Pamfir. A water diviner by trade, he's a hulking brute who symbolises Ukraine's indomitable spirit in the face of tyrannical incursion. Yet, for all the pugnacious Western and gangster movie overtones, there's a warmth and wit about the discussion of themes like family, faith, loyalty, and redemption that both moves and inspires.