Three Stories (1997) poster
1997 · drama · dark · anthology

Three Stories

Directed by Kira Muratova1h 53m1997
ElsewhereIMDb7.2822TMDB6.219
  • heavy
  • measured
  • intense
  • inventive
  • bleak
  • cold
Movie DNA

Heavy, measured, measured drama / dark, surreal in texture. Nihilistic, intimate, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor’s five-year-old daughter “all the abomination of her lumpen existence”. The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.

Our read · Three Stories (1997) reads as a heavy, measured, surreal drama · dark · anthology entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of Three Stories

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want an eccentric dark comedy anthology of senseless murders and cynical society.

ends unsettlingit stays with youa rollercoastergrips by minute 5attention 3/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upgraphic violence

Skip it tonightYou want feel-good stories or clear moral tales.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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