It is 1997. The empire has collapsed, leaving a void that has not been filled by freedom, but by chaotic and savage capitalism, widespread gangsterism, and a profound identity crisis. Brother is the feverish diagnosis of that era, shot on a shoestring budget, with “dirty” photography that reeks of cheap cigarettes and stale vodka, and an urgency that makes it seem more like a war report than a work of fiction. It is the Taxi Driver of a collapsed empire, but its Travis Bickle is not an alienated veteran; he is an adapted veteran.

The beating heart of this tumor is Danila Bagrov. And here we must pause, because modern Russian cinema is divided into “before” and “after” Danila. Sergei Bodrov Jr.'s performance (whose tragic and untimely death cemented his iconic status) is not a performance: it is an incarnation. Danila is not a hero. He is not an antihero. He is a neo-hero, a moral tabula rasa onto which a desperate nation has projected its thirst for justice. He returns from the First Chechen War (Russia's “Vietnam,” another open wound), dressed in a shapeless sweater that will become a generational fetish, and with an almost childlike kindness. He is polite, loves his mother, adores the rock music of Nautilus Pompilius. And, in the blink of an eye, without the slightest change in his placid gaze, he is a sociopathic killer of terrifying efficiency. He is the “holy fool” (the jurodivyj) of Russian literary tradition, but armed with a sawed-off shotgun. He is Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, but without the philosophical torment; Danila has no thesis about being a “superman,” he only has a tribal instinct: to protect “his own” (his brother, the defenseless) and eliminate “the others.”

His destination is Balabanov's St. Petersburg. Forget the Hermitage, the imperial palaces, the White Nights. The St. Petersburg of Brother is that of Crime and Punishment stripped of all Gothic romanticism. It is a labyrinth of damp courtyards (kolodcy, “wells”), dilapidated communal apartments (kommunalki), rattling trams, and black markets. Sergei Astachov's photography is deliberately anti-aesthetic, almost documentary-like. The city is not a backdrop, it is a hostile ecosystem, a muddy purgatory where crime is not an aberration but the only economic logic left. It is the exact opposite of the “glossy” and corrupt Moscow that Danila will visit in the sequel. Here, we are still in the soft underbelly of collapse, and Balabanov forces us to breathe the stale air of a civilization that has lost its bearings.

One cannot analyze Danila's psyche without dissecting his soundtrack. His Walkman (and later CD player) is not an accessory; it is a vital organ, a semiotic shield against a world he does not understand and from which he does not want to be understood. The music of Nautilus Pompilius is not a simple accompaniment; it is the text of the film. It is his conscience, his ethos. The melancholic ballads of Vjačeslav Butusov, a remnant of the rock idealism of Perestroika, are the only ‘pure’ thing Danila believes in. When “Kryl'ja” (Wings) starts, Danila enters a different dimension, where his violence is not crime, but justice. Music is his gospel, the only ideology that has replaced the failed one of the state. It is the contrast between the melancholic and poetic sound of Russian rock and the deafening brutality of Danila's actions that creates the moral short circuit of the film.

The morality of Brother is a minefield. The plot is pure noir despair: Danila arrives in St. Petersburg to look for his older brother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), whom he believes to be a successful man. He discovers that his “brother” (the brat of the title) is a small-time hitman, weak, worn out, and terrified. The real betrayal, for Danila, is not the crime; it is his brother's weakness, his moral corruption in exchange for money. Danila, almost by chance, takes over his “job,” but he does so with a different code. His violence is a form of cleansing. And here the film becomes dangerously seductive. Danila protects the only two “innocents” he finds: Nemets-Hoffman (Yuri Kuznetsov), a homeless Jewish/German man who represents the old intelligentsia that has been swept away, and Sveta (Svetlana Pis'mičenko), a trans woman trapped in a violent marriage.

Yet this “hero” is viscerally, casually xenophobic. His jokes about Caucasians, the French (“your music... is shit”), and Americans (“money ruins people”) are not a character flaw; they are the character. Balabanov has the ruthless courage to show us a “hero of the people” (narodnyj geroj) who is also a narrow-minded nationalist. He is a living paradox: a racist who protects a Jew, a killer who quotes moral maxims. His famous line, "What is strength, brother? Money? [...] Strength lies in truth“ (Сила в правде), is not a line from a B-movie. It is the battle cry of a generation that, having lost the ”Truth" (the Party's Pravda), desperately seeks a new, simpler one, written in blood.

The violence in Brother is not the aesthetic violence of Tarantino, to whom it has been lazily compared. Balabanov's violence is clumsy, hasty, dirty. The homemade silencer (an oil filter and a plastic bottle?) is the symbol of the DIY (do-it-yourself) that defined the 1990s, from commerce to crime. Brother became a cultural phenomenon because it captured lightning in a bottle: the desperate desire of a “simple” man who righted wrongs, punished the corrupt “new rich,” and protected the forgotten. Balabanov created a founding myth for New Russia, a dangerous, reactionary, and deeply seductive myth. It is a film that became the starting point from which all subsequent Russian cinema had to, willingly or unwillingly, begin again.