Often touted as an heir to Tarkovsky, Russian cinema's other famously
austere Andrey, Zvyagintsev previously competed at Cannes with «Leviathan» (2014), which won the jury's screenwriting award and went on to score an Oscar nomination for foreign -
language film.
The mechanics of the music box, cylinder, metal elements and pins, enlarged and magnified to an industrial scale, remind us of the visual
language of
films such as Chaplin's Modern Times andFritz Lang's Metropolis, as well as the
austere objectivity of German photographer Adolf Lazi's 1930's photographic series.