Dry Leaf (2025) Review
With 2021’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Alexandre Koberidze established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. While his latest film lacks the playful fabulism of its predecessor, its experiments with sound and light conjure a trance-like, mythic atmosphere that takes viewers not just through Georgia’s sprawling countryside, but into the heart of modernity itself. Centered around a father searching for his not-so-missing daughter, Dry Leaf is a road film unlike anything you’ll see this year. Shot entirely on low-resolution cameras, it’s as concerned on the texture of an image as it is with thematic resonance.
One criticism I’ve heard repeatedly is that the ‘novel appeal’ of Dry Leaf’s pixelated images ‘wears off’ over the course of its three-hour runtime, as if cinema is a circus performance or a new pair of jeans instead of an expressive artform. But given the film’s meditations on memory, mortality and perception, particularly in contemporary Georgia, the obscurity of its images feels like more than a mere aesthetic gimmick. Some scenes are so pixelated that people, places, and animals will magically appear out of nowhere. A dog will pop its head out of what we took to be a vast green field, or a collage of colorful blurs will suddenly crystallize into a group of people out for a walk. Many have compared this aspect of the film’s visuals to Cézanne’s Post-Impressionist paintings, which prioritized color and expression over photorealism. I’d take the comparison a step further and compare these images to Cézanne’s later paintings, in which expanses of untouched canvas became as integral to the composition as the brushstrokes themselves. Like these paintings, Koberidze’s images make their incompleteness part of what they express, gesturing to a larger world outside the story, one that is perhaps beyond our comprehension. There’s a kind of sublime awe when the camera zooms in and, for a brief second, all we can see are pixels shifting, their color changing with the daylight. These moments of revelation direct our attention to the strangeness and wonder of everyday life, an impulse that extends to the narrative itself.
As Irakli searches the countryside for his daughter, Lisa, a sports photographer, Dry Leaf gradually becomes less concerned with the mystery of her disappearance than his conversations with locals about their daily lives, the rhythms of their communities, and their personal memories. Unlike Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), in which a missing person mystery gives way to the entangled alienation of modernity, Koberidze’s film feels like an exploration of modernity in Georgia itself. Two children complaining that the snow grows higher every year, a bulldozer tearing down a local forest, and several shots of untamed grass growing across what used to be places of play. Taken together, these images turn the road movie structure into a portrait of a country in the midst of profound change. In a recent interview, Koberidze said the road movie’s inherently wandering nature was one of the first things that appealed to him about this project. Having spent several years abroad for film school, he describes all three of his films as attempts to understand his country anew. While many complain that the plot meanders, I’d say that’s the point. Dry Leaf is less a tightly wound thriller than a roving exploration of memory, human connection, and the strange poetry that emerges from their intersection.
In one scene, two characters are speaking, but the camera stays focused on a dog watching them, the light filtering through a nearby window making his eyes shine. It’s one of several moments where animals are given a physical presence while humans are just out of frame. There are even several characters who are outright described as ‘invisible,’ present only through disembodied voices. It speaks to the film’s preoccupation with the limits of perception and the significance of what remains unseen or overlooked. A puppy rolling in the grass, a horse trotting through a field; these images are almost mundane, yet Koberidze finds in them a quiet magic, showing all the beauty a simple afternoon can contain, if we only take the time to notice.
This is a film that asks viewers to look more carefully at the world, but its beautifully flawed images suggest that looking isn’t simply a matter of directing our attention to what seems most important. Sometimes, the most meaningful thing is what we wouldn’t ordinarily think to look at. Koberidze asks us to reconsider what deserves our attention, and in that way Dry Leaf is the kind of movie that will stay with you long after the credits roll. It's now available on VOD, and I couldn't recommend it enough. After watching it, I took my dog for a walk and felt much more present in the wind, the shadow of dancing treetops on the sidewalk, the soft patter of his paws on the pavement. It’s wondrous.
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