Courtesy of 20 Steps Production, Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Director George Sikharulidze's multi-layered debut exposes the layers of religiosity and right-wing ideology that make a Georgian teenager's coming of age so dangerous and conflict-ridden.

First of all, Georgian writer-director George Sikharulidze's debut mercilessly transports us to the last place in the world most of us would ever want to find ourselves: the lanky, concave frame and twisted, self-hating mindset of a budding incel. 18-year-old Sandro (notable newcomer Data Chachua) is a creep: a furtive groper in public, an awkward loner at the soccer club where he trains, and a sulky, absentee student in his final year of high school. But Sikharulidze's clever script soon deepens and complicates his characterization, turning him into a quiet emblem of the crisis of masculinity Georgia's younger generation is going through, in which modern, progressive values ​​are battling with sexism, right-wing ideology, and a kind of ancient religious hypocrisy that seeps into the bloodstream of the social body like a poison. “Panopticon” may not quite have the all-seeing eye that its title suggests, but its gaze is piercing, sharp and strange.

At home, Sandro lives under another all-seeing eye: that of the icon of Jesus that adorns the wall shrine in the apartment he shares with his disapproving, atheist maternal grandmother and his unbearably pious, frequently absent father (Malkhaz Abuladze). Dad obviously considers his own relationship with God far more important than anything as mundane as his earthly relationship with Sandro, and with the boy's mother in the U.S. and unable to return until her papers arrive, there's little to stop Sandro's worst impulses from racing unchecked and hormonally through an already disturbed psyche. When he finds a USB stick that one of his teammates, Lasha (Vakho Kedeladze), lost at soccer practice, and discovers that it contains both porn and a seemingly innocuous clip of Lasha's mother, Natalia (Ia Sukhitashvili), a hairdresser, celebrating her son's birthday, it's hard to guess which video will get him Oedipally hot enough to turn the Jesus picture on the wall and masturbate. He begins secretly stalking Natalia in her salon – rarely has the blissful sensuality of a hair wash been better evoked. His fixation becomes easier to follow, but also more difficult, when Lasha, who has dabbled in hate crimes, unexpectedly strikes up a friendship with Sandro, who starts hanging around Natalia's apartment.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sandro has a girlfriend, Tina (Salome Gelenidze) – a peripheral character who could have done with a bit more development given her later narrative importance. But Sandro's deeply buried sense of sexual shame and archaic ideas about women's purity mean that, despite his general horniness, he is the one who feels insulted when she raises the possibility of sex before marriage. Instead, he grows closer to Natalia, who, as portrayed by Sukhitashvili (so compelling in Dea Kulumbegashvili's magnificent Beginning), reacts with sly, part-maternal, part-romantic ambivalence.

As we've come to expect from new Georgian cinema, the controlled aesthetic suits the subject matter, with the story's moral gloom reflected in a palette full of bleakness and damp. Set against a backdrop of stained walls and faded wallpaper, Ketevan Nadibaidze's muted production design makes the most of both domestic spaces and cool, impersonal institutional interiors: locker rooms, classrooms, the dingy monastery where Sandro's father takes refuge after he decides to become a monk. The atmosphere of confinement is further enhanced by a recurring motif of doubling: between Sandro and Lasha after Sandro cuts his floppy hair into a crew cut; between Tina and her best friend Lana (Marita Meskhoradze); and between strangers on the subway who suddenly and mysteriously turn out to be twins.

Such flourishes have an air of repressed surreality, as if they were the pressure-valve manifestations of a troubled subconscious trying to release some of its pent-up misery. But otherwise, “Panopticon” largely stays in a register of only slightly heightened realism, unusual in new Georgian cinema. Though it recalls the more formally austere “Beginning” in its casting of Sukhitashvili, and though it includes an excerpt from Alexander Koberidze’s wondrous and whimsical “What Do We See When We Look Up at the Sky?”, Sikharulidze’s film actually manages to straddle the overtly allegorical nature of these titles with the restraint and unadorned focus of the Romanian New Wave. That's perhaps not surprising, given that it's a Romanian co-production and the cinematographer is Oleg Mutu, best known for shooting Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or award-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. But while we can see such influences in Panopticon, the film is also its own chimerical beast, an impression reinforced by the surprisingly moving finale of this earnest, hard-hearted film, which offers a tiny bit of redemptive hope that's all the more miraculous for having survived in a culture where the personal is political and the political is omnipresent.