Clocking in at 75 minutes, Russian film Silent Souls (directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko) is short, but more somber than sweet. It opens with an arrestingly lovely yet sorrowful perspective of the back of a man bicycling a wooded winter road after a rainstorm with a pair of buntings in a cage attached to the rear. Then the angle shifts to the view from the back of the bike, the road vanishing behind it, the only sounds the faint twitter of the birds and the squeak of wheels. Silent Souls gravely shoulders the weight of this still, grieving atmosphere in every scene as it chronicles the three-day road trip of friends Aist and Miron as they give the latter’s recently departed wife Tanya a ritual Merja send-off.

Settled along the Neya river, the Merja hail from an ancient Finno-Ugric tribe from Lake Nero in West-Central Russia. As the soft-spoken narrator Aist muses, “Neya is one of those towns no one remembers today” -- one of many of the Merja’s orphaned villages, rites, and rivers with forgotten names. It’s clear that the film is both an ode to the forgotten (people, places, and cultures) and an act of remembrance. The desolately beautiful landscape Aist and Miron traverse -- both in the present and in flashbacks to Aist’s youth and the death of his mother -- haunts the screen with its graveyard of ghost towns and barren trees. Time seems to stand still as if the pair has crossed over into some spiritual underworld, as they perform the proper Merja ceremonies to prepare Tanya’s body for the next life. With customs that range from washing her naked body to twining colorful threads into her hair down there (so to speak), and “smoke” -- a tradtion where, Aist explains, you reveal intimate truths about your loved ones you’d never share with anyone else while they were still alive. For example, Miron tells Aist that he met his very obedient wife Tanya when he was 40 and her 19 -- and thinks it important to add that “all three of Tanya’s holes were working.” According to Aist “smoke” turns grief into tenderness. Through more recollections and scenes from the past we also learn that Tanya may not have been in love with Miron, and may in fact have shared a fleeting spark of passion with Aist.

Surreal, sad, and haunting, Silent Souls is intriguingly voyeuristic and just brief enough to avoid tedium. It’s a dreamlike odyssey, visually affecting with a sense of emotional disconnectedness that seems part of its expression of grief. It ends with a foreshadowed twist, and alas entirely ignores the elephant in the room: how did Miron’s young wife get from discontented to dead? A strange adventure in anthropological cinema, Silent Souls is a trip that will linger and lurk in your thoughts long after the credits roll.

Grade: B-