The Delivery Guy

One thing is certain: Alexey can never pay for his father’s operation from his income as a pizza courier. Everything changes when the courier finds an envelope containing a Sim card. As soon as he activates it, Alexey gets instructions to do a dangerous yet lucrative job. Alexey doesn’t hesitate a moment.
At least that’s how it looks, because the young Russian director deliberately leaves out any psychological explanation. As a result, the film has the matter-of-fact nature of a mathematical proposition: if A then B then C. And yet we are repeatedly confronted with unexpected events.
Stempkovsky amplifies this dislocating tone by allowing apparently crucial events to pass unnoticed, while the camera focuses on what is known as ‘dead time’: the time between the actions. In the end, we wonder whether the whole thing happened by accident. Maybe that was the idea all along.