From bleak social realism to a grotesque fairy tale: “The Gateway” at the 2025 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film

Ukrainian director Volodymyr Tykhyy’s The Gateway (original name: Brama) (2017) is a film that defies easy categorisation. 

Loosely adapted from the stage play At the Beginning and End of Times (2013), written by the Ukrainian novelist and playwright Pavlo Arie, it presents itself on the surface as a post-apocalyptic folk tale, mixing radioactive mushrooms, ghostly mermaids, and alien sightings in the misty forests of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. But to watch it with expectations of a coherent sci-fi or mystical narrative is to miss the point. Instead, The Gateway feels like stepping into the small, stubborn life of someone on the margins — a figure quietly enduring while larger dramas unfold just out of view.       

At its core is a strange domestic triangle: Grandmother Prisya (Irma Vitovska), her mentally simple grandson Vovtshyk (Yaroslav Fedorchuk), and her daughter Slava (Vitalina Bibliv), who lies chronically ill and emotionally withdrawn. While Prisya immerses herself in myth and madness — talking to water spirits, harvesting radioactive mushrooms — and Vovtshyk floats through life with wide-eyed innocence, Slava stands apart. She is the only one who has previously left the zone and, unlike the other two, still carries the desire to escape. Her presence is a quiet but powerful counterpoint: where Prisya and Vovtshyk seem fused to the strange rhythms of their ruined world, Slava remains tethered to something outside of it.

She is also the only one to maintain relationships with outsiders, though these connections are fraught and fleeting. Her ambivalence toward her mother’s magical thinking and her son’s dependence hints at a more grounded, if bitter, awareness of their situation. In a film where reality and fantasy bleed into one another, Slava is the anchor — an exhausted witness to both the absurd rituals of survival and the slow erasure of hope. Her illness may suggest decay, but her yearning to leave again marks her as the character most aware of the absurdity of staying.

Rather than telling a straightforward story, The Gateway offers an impressionistic portrait of life in a forgotten zone — caught between decaying Soviet infrastructure, government neglect, and lingering radiation. The fantasy elements never coalesce into a grand revelation; instead, they highlight the surreal resilience of those left behind. Prisya isn’t on a hero’s journey. She’s surviving, stubbornly and absurdly, while the rest of the world moves on or comes back as tourists snapping selfies in hazmat suits.

Expect tonal shifts: from bleak social realism to grotesque fairy tale, from satire to psychedelic interlude. The visual effects and makeup are on the rough side, and some scenes feel like they belong in another film entirely. But that’s part of the experience. If you’re willing to go along with its uneven rhythms, The Gateway becomes a strange, sometimes frustrating, often memorable glimpse into the collision between folklore, trauma, and survival.

Don’t expect answers. Do expect mushrooms.

The Gateway (2017) was screened on 26 April as part of the 2025 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.