I love a good bug movie. I’ve owned various bugs — mostly tarantulas and scorpions — over my two and a half decades. Just a few weeks ago, I lamented how we need more spider-based horror movies. The same could be said for just about any creepy-crawly, and Aik Karapetian’s The Brazen features quite a number of them. 

The Latvian horror movie playing at the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival in Estonia runs just short of 80 minutes and moves with the smooth efficiency that the run-time demands. The plot could hardly be simpler: a family, on the verge of disintegration, inherits a house from their grandfather and they try to rid it of all sorts of bugs that have found a home in the walls as they convert the house into a dance studio. Karapetian’s bugs of choice stay within the realm of realism. Cockroaches, maggots, and other infestation-heavy insects — rather than vaguely supernatural spiders, as with 2023’s Infested, or some other monstrous creation — require eviction by force.

The dad (Didzis Jonovs) is something of an academic homophobe, apparently inspired by Jordan Peterson, with an underdeveloped understanding of the boundaries between teachers and students. The mother (Marta Grase) no longer sees reason to offer intimacy to her husband, who distanced himself from the family after the death of one of their children. Meanwhile, Eriks (Gregors Lakis), their son, grapples with queer sexual expression in solitude; he also puts bugs in jars in between learning French. Their daughter, the baby of the family, wonders why dad hits mom and complains about pesky things like having a bug in her ear. You know, normal family stuff?

Jurģis Kmins, who shot one of my favorite films of last year in Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania, elevates the thin screenplay with a camera that shrinks and slinks around the house. The Brazen treats bugs almost like the great director Yasujirō Ozu treats urban landscapes and the outdoors: as pillow shots (or the plot equivalent to a pillow shot). The family dynamics dominate the camera’s most fundamental concern and it’s only in between these sequences where the bugs crawl, fly, and swarm in detailed close-ups. Kmins’ makes the most of the rest and turns the camera into a bug — looking up at these strange, occasionally appalling humans — just like they look down on the bugs. He also chooses to light the scenes by mood more than by the weak dictation of natural light and the images he creates as a result sometimes feel like they come from a different era.

The Brazen
2023
dir. Aik Karapetian
78 min.

Part of the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival

Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.