At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has?
Embellishing its oblique political allegory with a cavalcade of outré imagery, Andrey Paounov’s debut fiction feature is atmospherically captivating – even if it does start feeling repetitive.