In the streets of Minsk, where winter seems to lengthen the shadows and silence weighs as heavily as snow, two people who would never have crossed paths under normal circumstances meet by accident. White Snail (2025), directed by Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, builds from this premise a story of improbable connection, marked by emotional fragility, loneliness, and a political backdrop that seems to conspire against even the faintest trace of happiness. The film draws inspiration from the real-life experiences of its protagonists, Marya Imbro and Mikhail Senkov, both first-time actors. She, a model seeking opportunities, plays Masha—a young woman with a slender frame, bleached hair, and nearly invisible eyebrows, whose ethereal appearance stands in stark contrast to a world that treats her as mere merchandise. He, stocky and tattooed, embodies Misha, a pathologist who works night shifts in the morgue and spends his free time painting cadaver scenes with unsettling precision.

From the opening sequence, the tone is set: Masha is shown attempting to suffocate herself with a plastic bag; elsewhere, Misha performs an autopsy with the methodical detachment of someone who has repeated the gesture hundreds of times. There is no traditional courtship, no lighthearted banter: their first conversations revolve around death, isolation, and depression. Where other films might show sunset strolls, here we witness a lesson on how to open a skull or cut a tongue—shot with a strange tenderness. Cinematographer Mikhail Khursevich finds beauty in this rawness. The images shift between clinical clarity and poetic glow: phone screens, scooter lights, nightclub neons, and close-ups of slow-moving white snails—symbols that point directly to the title. Masha’s body and face are observed with an uncomfortable intimacy, as if through the eyes of modeling agencies or potential Chinese employers who see her solely as a commodity. This narrative thread resonates with recent portrayals of the modeling world in Eastern Europe, though here the emphasis lies more on intimate experience than direct denunciation.

The presence of a political undercurrent is inevitable. Belarus remains under the rule of Aleksandr Lukashenko, and that climate of control and repression seeps into the story. Masha and Misha’s relationship seems doomed not only by their personal wounds but also by a system that combines economic precarity, social prejudice, and state pressure. In this context, Masha is framed almost as a folkloric figure—a witch or seer who disrupts the established order. Her mother, convinced that her daughter’s depression is a form of possession, resorts to an exorcism that the camera captures as an act of expulsion. Misha, for his part, is the archetype of the misunderstood artist, rendering the rawness of death with a dark beauty. Together, they form a couple that fits no classic romantic mold: they are two distorted reflections in a broken mirror, bound by a mutual recognition born of fractures, not wholeness.

One of White Snail’s most remarkable achievements is its ability to merge the tangible and the imagined. The delicate, strange white snails of the title become a metaphor for the protagonists’ vulnerability—creatures that move forward leaving a silent, fragile trail. The film uses these symbolic elements to build an atmosphere of magical realism, where the poetic does not soften the harshness but instead adds new layers of meaning. The performances—restrained, without grand emotional outbursts—defy the expectation of instant identification. But that distance is intentional: Kremser and Peter seek to show two people who, by chance or fate, come to share a space they never would have occupied together otherwise.