VIFF 2012 review: Student

This postmodern riff on Crime and Punishment is set in a soulless Central Asian present where godless European philosophy has been replaced by godless global capitalism. There is no Inspector Porfiry with whom our 21st-century Raskolnikov can match wits, but that doesn’t prevent Darezhan Omirbayev’s reimagining from being fairly successful, in a bleak, Bressonian kind of way.