The Banishment (2007) on Netflix
Alex brings his wife Vera and their two children to his childhood home in the countryside. There Vera tells him she is pregnant, and that the baby is not his.
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- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.5/109,722 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes65%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mark turns up at Alex's door with a bullet in his arm and asks for help. He refuses a hospital, wary of his criminal ties and of the police questions that would follow, so Alex takes the bullet out himself, and Mark recovers. Days later Alex drives his wife Vera and their children, Kir and Eva, to the countryside house where he grew up. There Vera tells him she is pregnant, and that the child is not his. The distance between the couple grows while they hide it from the children and from the friends who come to visit, and Alex is unsure what to do.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Banishment (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A shot of a donkey that lasts only a few seconds on screen took the crew half a day to film and used three cans of film; Andrey Zvyagintsev joked that he would never work with animals again.
- The Banishment's screenplay was brought to director Andrey Zvyagintsev by Artyom Melkumian, a friend who worked as a television cameraman and spent ten years adapting William Saroyan's novel The Laughing Matter.
- Andrey Zvyagintsev postponed filming The Banishment and waited twelve months for actress Maria Bonnevie, who had a year-long contract with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
- Andrey Zvyagintsev tried to avoid casting Konstantin Lavronenko, the lead of his previous film The Return, but ended up giving him a lead role in The Banishment because he could not find anyone equal to him.
- The Banishment's house, railway station, church, cemetery and the wooden bridge next to the house were all purpose-built on location near Cahul, Moldova.
- The Banishment paid special attention to architecture, signs and vehicles: Finnish bank notes were altered to make them look more abstract and a French sign was digitally removed in post-production.
- The Banishment's script originally had a lot of dialogue, but when Andrey Zvyagintsev began testing it with actors he called it "a disaster" and remorselessly cut the dialogue.
