Nikolay Khomeriki, the Cannes auteur who detoured through Russian blockbusters

Nikolay Khomeriki

Photo: ЯЁ32Ы / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 17, 1975 Moscow, Soviet Union
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Ninth, The Icebreaker
Awards	Kinotavr Grand Prix · Cinéfondation Second Prize, Cannes Film Festival (shared) · Kommersant Prize, Moscow International Film Festival · Window to Europe Film Festival Grand Prix

Nikolay Khomeriki keeps two filmographies under one name. One belongs to the director Cannes selected twice for Un Certain Regard, a maker of long, quiet takes who leaves actors alone with a silence until something gives. The other belongs to the man who trapped a Soviet ship in Antarctic ice and sent a St Petersburg detective after an occult killer, for the multiplex. He has never publicly picked one over the other. The film that brought the two halves back together was the one almost nobody wanted to pay for, and it won him the biggest prize in Russian cinema.

The road to the camera ran through an office. A Muscovite by birth, Khomeriki graduated in economics from Moscow International University and took a job as an accountant at Coca-Cola. He later studied in Maastricht and Amsterdam, and in Amsterdam he and a friend set up a small firm importing Dutch household chemicals into Russia. Cinema came through the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in Moscow, where he trained in the workshop of Vladimir Khotinenko, Pavel Finn and Vladimir Fenchenko. His first exercise there, a three-minute étude called Kaplya, won a prize at a festival in Sopot whose jury was chaired by Krzysztof Zanussi.

Khomeriki, who was born in Moscow on 17 April 1975 and finished the Moscow courses in 2000, was 26 when a French Foreign Ministry grant took him to Paris in 2001 and to La Fémis, the national film school, where he completed the directing course in 2005. Near the end of his studies Philippe Garrel brought him on as an assistant on Regular Lovers, which went on to win the Silver Lion in Venice. His graduation short, Vdvoyom, a chronicle of a son and his mother’s last days together, was selected for the Cinéfondation at Cannes, where a jury chaired by Edward Yang gave it a share of the second prize.

His first feature, 977, went straight to Un Certain Regard in 2006 as the only Russian film at the festival that year. It is a chamber piece set in a closed research institute, where a young scientist measures a mysterious numerical index in human subjects and fixates on one woman whose reading reaches the threshold. The casting showed where Khomeriki had been: Yekaterina Golubeva, Leos Carax’s wife, plays one of the leads, and Carax himself takes a silent supporting part. Critics in Moscow and at Variety saw Tarkovsky in its corridors and long takes. Tale in the Darkness, about a lonely juvenile-affairs inspector in Vladivostok, returned him to Un Certain Regard in 2009 and won Boris Kamorzin the best actor prize at Kinotavr. Heart’s Boomerang followed in 2011 and took the Kommersant prize at the Moscow International Film Festival.

Then he changed lanes. After several years of television work, Khomeriki delivered The Icebreaker in 2016, a large-scale disaster film loosely based on the Mikhail Somov, the Soviet vessel that spent 133 days drifting in Antarctic ice in 1985. Pyotr Fyodorov and Sergei Puskepalis play the deposed captain and his hard-line replacement, and the crew spent three and a half months shooting in Murmansk, Sevastopol, St Petersburg and the Khibiny mountains, with the decommissioned nuclear icebreaker Lenin as a set. Selfie, adapted from Sergey Minaev’s novel, cast Konstantin Khabensky as a celebrity author replaced by his own double, with Fyodor Bondarchuk beside him, and topped the Russian box office on its opening weekend in 2018. The Ninth, a period occult thriller with Evgeny Tsyganov and the British actress Daisy Head, came in 2019. White Snow, the story of the skier Yelena Välbe’s five gold medals at the 1997 world championships, reached cinemas in 2021.

That stretch is where opinion on him splits. The Icebreaker opened at number one in Russia, ahead of a Tom Cruise action sequel, yet ended its run having earned back less than 60 per cent of what it cost. Reviewers praised Khabensky and Vladislav Opelyants’s camerawork in Selfie and took the script apart. Reading those films as a sell-out misses what carried over from 977: the patience with faces and rooms is visible in the ice sequences and in the gaslit Petersburg of The Ninth, a city that critics, this magazine’s included, found gorgeous even as the plot sprang leaks. The weak point of the commercial run is structure, and structure was never what his festival films were selling. The question his career keeps putting is whether a director whose strength is atmosphere can also be the engineer a genre script needs.

Freeze Dance was his answer. Written with the screenwriter Alexander Rodionov over roughly three years and shot near Gelendzhik on a small budget, it follows a teenage couple who hide out in a derelict house in the woods and meet an older pair who look like their future selves. Khomeriki cast two drama students, Olga Bodrova and Valery Stepanov, and let scenes run without clean takes or calls of “cut”. He has said that everyone he showed the script to turned it down, some because they did not understand it, others because that kind of film belonged to the 1990s. “But what difference does it make to me what modern cinema is now?” he said. “I make what I am able to make.” At Kinotavr in September 2021 part of the audience walked out before the end; the jury gave it the Grand Prix and the best actress prize to Bodrova. Iskusstvo Kino compared its language to the Dardenne brothers and Carlos Reygadas, while Valery Kichin of Rossiyskaya Gazeta called it record-breakingly slow and predicted it would fail at the box office.

Since then he has kept moving between the two modes. After the series Save His Only Son in 2023, he directed Clean for the streaming service Wink, an eight-episode drama set in an underground St Petersburg brothel in 1903, again written by Rodionov, with Fyodor Bondarchuk, Viktoria Isakova and Nikita Kologrivy. It premiered in June 2024, and Moskvich Mag’s critic found it expensive-looking but lifeless. In November 2025 came Tik-Tak, billed as his first comedy: a married acting couple on the verge of divorce must get through one last children’s New Year show as Ded Moroz and Snegurochka, with a bomb in the dressing room. Boris Kamorzin, the lead of Tale in the Darkness sixteen years earlier, is in the cast.

No new film has been announced since. The useful thing to watch in whatever he makes next is less the genre than whether he leaves himself the room he took in Freeze Dance, the slow film he made when no one asked for it.

Tags: The Ninth, Nikolay Khomeriki, Freeze Dance, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Konstantin Khabensky, Russian cinema