This was one of my most interesting MIFF experiences this year. It had the hallmarks of the kind of film I like – Georgian (Scary Mother and My Happy Family are two Georgian films I loved), about feminist issues (access to abortion for low-income women) and reviews called it “tense, ominous, and viscerally captivating.”

What could go wrong? Well I actually really hated it while I was watching it and there is a scene relatively early on where I was convinced this was being directed by a man – I tend to go into films without knowing much about them. That’s not a problem per se – Sebastián Lelio’s The Wave comes to mind – but in this instance it was a jarring characterisation that felt like a bloke’s fantasy of how women live their lives rather than reality.

I stuck it through to the end though, and a quick search showed that the director, Dea Kulumbegashvili, identifies as female. I’ve skimmed through a lot of reviews since then, and also had a chat with a lovely woman as we are walking away from the cinema, and can see that some people really love this film. They talk about it being pro-abortion, and a really insightful look at the importance of women’s bodily autonomy.

I’m not so sure.

It starts really strangely, with an extended shot of a naked, faceless crone-like figure in the dark while we hear children’s voices playing and laughing and hear Nina‘s name used. Smash cut to a torrential rainstorm over a river where the camera hovers for a significant amount of time and then moves down to the surface of the water. An excellent shot. Then smash cut to an aerial of view of a woman giving birth. And it really is a woman giving birth I’m sure.

You can see that this is the kind of film that is structured in a way to unsettle and challenge us and, with it’s obtuse, lengthy, static shots, make us suffer in order to understand its meaning.

Ostensibly it is about Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an OB/GYN in a Georgian rural hospital. We start off with her being accused of negligence because that baby we have just seen born was still born. This gives us an opportunity to establish her status within the hospital. She is being advocated for by her colleague David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who is being given the authority to oversee the investigation into the case. It is clear there are rumours about Nina, that she performs abortion which is against the law and it seems that the hospital is looking for a reason to sack her.

The abortions and women being able to control their bodies and fertility are some of the threads that we follow. There are consultations with young wives where Nina secretly provides them with birth control pills. There is a deeply upsetting series of scenes where a mother pressures her into giving an abortion to her obviously intellectually disabled daughter who somehow ‘keeps getting pregnant.’

Nina voices some ethical concerns about the girl’s right to choose whether she wants to be a mother or not but it is clear that’s the ramifications of the girl’s father finding out that their daughter is pregnant is too awful to think of. Nobody thinks to ask how she keeps getting pregnant or look at any aspects of consent.

We are shown this abortion at great length. The camera, as it frequently does in this film, frames to the side of the action so we see the abdomen and upper legs of the girl from the side and hear every sound and moan and watch her body writhe. It is as awful as it sounds, compounded by the knowledge that in this story, this girl is unknowning and unwilling.

That faceless crone from the beginning keeps appearing. First of all she does it off camera, with the camera constantly sweeping and moving around with audio of heavy breathing. We eventually understand we are seeing the point of view of the crone.

The scenes that made me want to give up on this film are ones that are repeated throughout where Nina, someone who obviously has few warm connections in her life – although married colleague David seems awfully keen – goes out for anonymous sex with random men. When I say random, I mean truly random – a guy out of a lonely road washing his car, hitchhikers, men at cattle markets.

The role of the crone is intriguing, and for awhile I thought maybe this was from a bit of folk horror and Nina was actually a crone who has existed for thousands of years to help women in their need. I might have found this a bit more interesting but eventually it seems pretty clear that the crone is how Nina sees herself, as she ugly and old and faceless.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, about all of the reviews that say it is pro-abortion. On the surface it is, as we who sit in countries where abortion is legal can recognise when we are seeing women who should be given more choice. We can see how the men in their lives get all the say and are quite happy to be violent when women don’t toe the line.

What worries me though is that the metaphor of the crone shows how conducting abortions makes a doctor deeply hate herself – and it is not that this is the way others see her for what she is doing, but how she sees herself. And the abortion we watch is one that is not consensual. To me it places us in a very murky ground where we are not seeing the stories of the rural women, we are not seeing the positive impact that abortion or birth control has. We are seeing a broken and dysfunctional doctor and we understand very little about who she is or why she does what she does. It feels dark and ugly with no reprieve or resolution.

My MIFF buddy Kyle loved this film and it was really interesting to talk to him about it. Where I was frustrated by its obtuseness and the very very very long static shots that are often gorgeous but with minimal narrative thread or character interest, he loved the way it made him feel uncomfortable and questioning its meaning.

For me, it just dragged and at the end I didn’t feel I knew more about the world. As one reviewer said, “I fell asleep and when I woke up, it was the same shot.” If you want to judge for yourself, it is already available on streaming through Mubi.