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Variola Vera Movie Review

Variola Vera is a 1982 Serbian horror drama film directed by Goran Markovic and starring Rade Serbedzija. It is an excellent epidemic movie that is quite timeless.

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“Picka je polni organ.

Pizda je karakterna osobina“

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In 1972, a man travelling through Yugoslavia catches a disease from a shopkeeper, which is later misdiagnosed in the hospital, resulting in a massive smallpox outbreak across Belgrade. The title refers to the smallpox virus that erupted in the sixties and seventies across the world and was eventually eradicated in the eighties. The 1972 Yugoslav outbreak was the worst one in Europe and this movie dramatizes those events.

This film saw an expected surge in popularity and viewership during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. While international viewers view it as a horror feature, Serbian fans see it as Markovic’s attack on the communist regime and how unhealthy it was to society. While there is that sociological and political element of satirization in the film, it is extremely subtle. The movie operates more as a horror and as a disaster film.

Yes, what we have here are a group of people brought together by an inconvenience, which is your regular disaster movie trope. The film operates so well within those disaster and horror confines that I was honestly surprised by its immense American cinema influences. Yes, a bigger budget would have produced an even stronger film with the beginning being particularly badly affected by that smaller budget, but Markovic did the best that he could with these limitations and he should be applauded for making what is basically a genre film that really works.

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Rade Serbedzija was the standout of the cast in the best-written role. Others were also very good as the cast is excellent, but some did not get much to do with Bogdan Diklic being particularly sidelined in a rather minor role. I personally would have discarded the sexual harassment theme that was explored through the doctor-nurse dynamic as it wasn’t crucial to this story, but otherwise all characters were well realized and wonderfully performed.

Variola Vera is very much a horror movie judging by those couple of scenes that emphasize the grotesqueness of this disease that puts the recent pandemic to shame. There is a scene of that first patient that was especially horrific and another scene that emphasized darkness to a chilling effect. The tone and atmosphere of utter chaos, paranoia and fear of the unknown were superbly conveyed throughout the film.

The big reason why it works so well as a horror picture is that score. That flute theme is incredibly creepy and eerie, leading to some downright disturbing moments. The sound and score are so fantastic and the cinematography quite effective that the film was still elevated to a more cinematic status in spite of its budgetary constraints.

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While Variola Vera can be regarded as a social commentary on communist Yugoslavia, I would counter that it has a more universal appeal as a horror disaster film. Yes, there are those elements of corrupt doctors that also fail to address the problem quick enough, everything else that transpired afterward was depicted in a positive light, and if you think about it the country vaccinated the entire population and eradicated the disease very successfully. But in that depiction of all the different people and how they react to this danger, the movie was quite timely and all-encompassing, especially for its short runtime.