The Marshes

A true visual guide to an otherworldly life. The seven episodes of Bogland in the first season are so gripping you won’t be able to look away. In advance, I’ll say that there won’t be a second season—the screenwriter was declared a foreign agent and is now facing legal trouble back home.

So, what can you expect from the completed first season?

A group of young people finds themselves in a timeless, post-death, post-civilization limbo—if you can call it that. Here, things unfold in a way that best reflects the existence of those who have died or exist beyond the threshold. Nothing is clear or fixed; everything flows—and yet, everything finds its place. If something or someone hasn’t found their place or expression in life, they do so here.

Where is “here”? In an abandoned settlement of a few huts called Bogland. In this place, not only do the concepts of time, place, and causality disappear, but so do our usual notions of good and evil, the sense of reality, and even the body itself. A seemingly ordinary story about the abuses of a local chemical plant manager turns out to be anything but ordinary, as the plot long ago transcended the boundaries of human perception and understanding of earthly matters. Perhaps the idea of the script is that when evil exceeds all reasonable limits, those limits truly blur, and people begin living in some phantasmagorical world. A kind of mass psychosis emerges. Though the viewer doesn’t seem ready to accept the idea of mass madness. In any case, the mystical ideas resonated with me more.

I always ask myself where my child is and what happens to them after the transition. And the film seems to have done well with this task. It’s like falling into a dream in which—and only in which—I communicate with my child. The genre’s laws mirror the laws of dreams, and thus the laws of our subconscious. And as we know (and as Jung also said), our loved ones, after death, reside precisely within us, in the realm of this very subconscious. We say, “Now he lives in my soul,” “He is forever in my memory.” And these aren’t just words. The film’s creators allowed us to feel what it’s like—There. What the world order is there, what emotions prevail, what people expend their energy on, what they believe in, and how they cope with difficulties. I don’t want to spoil anything, because no external shell of events can convey the atmosphere that permeates this film. You have to see and feel it yourself. And believe me, this cinematic product is in no way comparable to such worn-out kitsch as the revelations of Shiku Shavier or such hits as The Sixth Sense or What Dreams May Come. No, this is something else entirely. I’d say it’s a psychologically sound film story. And I believe in such a story.