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Mirage Movie Review

Mirage (Iluzija) is a 2004 Macedonian crime drama film directed by Svetozar Ristovski and starring Vlado Jovanovski, Mustafa Nadarevic and Nikola Djuricko. It’s an implausible flick.

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“I’ve learned one thing:

there’s no escaping from the sewer“

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It is about a talented but abused schoolboy who is betrayed by illusory hopes of a better future and transformed by harsh circumstances into a criminal. The premise had a lot of potential. I understand the goal of the film – to portray how sometimes life can beat you to the ground, especially in a small town in a small country where all hope is lost, especially for those who are different, smarter and have some talent.

However, the execution is very problematic that I ended up not caring for this entire movie. I found it to be passable, but nothing more than that. The main problem is its unrealistic nature. None of it is believable in any shape or form. Again, the overall premise and plot are solid, but it is the execution in the singular plot points that really bothered me.

Let’s give a couple of examples. Probably the thing that best exemplifies this implausibility is the fact that all of the boys in the class are basically delinquents and future criminals. That was not only unrealistic, but plain stupid. What also illustrates so well the movie’s implausible nature is the string of circumstances that led to the boy becoming a criminal. Those circumstances definitely felt overly fabricated for me. Yes, the film’s ending is brutally memorable, dark and incredibly disturbing even, but I could not believe the circumstances that brought the protagonist to that point myself.

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It is very obvious from start to finish that the director himself hated living in Macedonia. He was literally screaming that feeling throughout the film’s runtime. I found that very troublesome. I personally can relate to that feeling coming from a deeply flawed country myself, but still this is the extremes we are talking about here and Svetozar Ristovski here focused on so much despair and negativity that, although very memorable and emotional, never felt honest. However, setting aside my issues with his aim here, I cannot underestimate his work as a director as his directing here is confident and quite good.

The overall film is quite well made. Mirage is well shot, very well directed and also well paced and structured. The highlight has to be the acting as everybody did a really good job with the characterization also being mostly solid. I personally found the delinquent kids utterly unbelievable and obviously inspired by the US teenage movies, but the protagonist himself is quite good and I really liked the actor playing him.

Clearly the casting in Iluzija was superb. Marko Jovanovski looks like a genuine child star as he looks very interesting and perfect for a film like this one. But the most important thing is that his acting here is excellent and quite believable. I also really liked Mustafa Nadarevic. The scenes between the two were wonderful and he was the only genuinely good man in this otherwise very bleak movie populated by horrible people.

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Nikola Djuricko plays Paris, a man who is quite possibly just the figment of the boy’s imagination as his every appearance is shrouded in mystery. This was actually the best part of Mirage that perfectly fits its dual meaning title (illusion literally and illusion of a better life). All of his scenes are very interesting and he was memorable in the role. I just wish the rest of the film was as intriguing and less convenient.