The fiction debut by Austrian-German duo Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, White Snail, initially recalls the Lithuanian debut Toxic by Saulė Bliuvaitė.
It opens with one of the protagonists, Masha (Marya Imbro), trying to land a modelling gig in China online from her home in Minsk. As the geopolitical situation worsens, she plans to leave her homeland behind.
Masha, extremely pale, carries an umbrella even on the streets and continues training at a modelling agency in preparation for a potential breakthrough. However, early on the film diverges from Toxic, which follows local girls from impoverished backgrounds attempting to break out. Masha attempts suicide by overdose. She is saved, but continues her morbid fascination.
Kremser and Peter have, across their earlier works, maintained a consistent interest in liminal zones between documentary observation and constructed form. Space Dogs follows non-human subjects within a narrative framework, while Dreaming Dogs extends this inquiry into a more explicitly experimental register.
In both cases, the directors demonstrate a tendency to displace conventional subjectivity. White Snail, their first fiction feature, retains this methodological ambiguity.
After her release from the hospital, Masha becomes drawn to mortuary worker Misha (Mikhail Senkov). Under the pretext of searching for a family member’s body, she surprises him during his night shift, marking the beginning of a peculiar relationship. White Snail gradually moves away from Masha’s modelling ambitions and subverts the expected girl-meets-boy trajectory.
Despite the apparent setup for a romance between two individuals unlikely to meet under ordinary circumstances, the underlying motif remains death. Masha appears to suffer from a depressive state shaped partly by her surroundings, while Misha is in daily professional contact with death. He also carries darker impulses, which he channels into amateur painting, producing disturbing, macabre tableaux.
The dynamic between them carries a mirroring quality already encoded in their names, yet diverges in outlook, as both share loneliness and an attraction to death but approach it differently, with Misha leaning into folk belief and ritual, while Masha, younger and less anchored, remains detached, erratic and at times unreadable, turning what initially resembles a girl-meets-boy setup into a more unstable and asymmetrical relationship.
White Snail revolves around outsiders and the theme of loneliness. In contrast to conventional coming-of-age narratives, and despite its social drama aesthetics, Kremser and Peter lean toward psychological and existential concerns.
Living under an autocratic regime and in constant proximity to death, both protagonists carry burdens that are not solely emotional. Masha’s parents are divorced, and her father expects her to move to Poland, while Misha lives with his mother in a dilapidated apartment. The dynamic between them is defined less by romance and more by a search for emotional anchoring.
The directors weave their experimental approach into the execution. Both leads are non-professional actors with backgrounds related to their characters’ occupations. Prepared separately, they meet for the first time on set, where the directors observe and capture their interaction in real time, resulting in a visible hesitation that carries into the performances.
White Snail is less event-driven than a psychological probe, where two differing perspectives, worldviews and ambitions intersect through the shared motif of death. Misha adopts the role of a caretaker figure, attempting to help Masha through her persistent melancholy by turning to folk medicine and superstition. Their eventual confrontation emerges from differing attitudes toward death, with Misha leaning toward traditional beliefs, while Masha remains more detached from such frameworks.
Cinematographer Mikhail Khursevich focuses on texture and light. Artificial illumination, particularly in nocturnal urban settings, produces a chromatic palette that leans toward sterility and saturation, aligning with the directors’ interest in destabilising preconceived images of Minsk as uniformly austere. While a social drama framework underpins the film, Khursevich’s visual approach diverges from the austere aesthetic typically associated with the genre.
While White Snail resembles Eastern European drama, the film ultimately shifts away from overt social drama toward a more internalised psychological portrait. Its docu-fiction ambiguity reinforces a detached and observational tone. Anchored in themes of loneliness, death and life under an implied autocratic regime, the film unfolds as a restrained and at times unsettling anti-romance, likely to resonate more with audiences attuned to understated storytelling than with those expecting conventional dramatic resolution.
The film screened at the 2026 Diagonale in Graz, Austria.