ZOOLOGY *

Not so much body horror as surrealist comedy, this Russian film is about a middle-aged woman who works in a zoo and who one day finds she has grown a very fleshy tail which seems to have a mind of its own, (it certainly comes in handy, shall we say, when she's in the bath and wants to pleasure herself). As you might expect, it also sets her apart from her co-workers and neighbours but then she was never that sociable to begin with. Indeed, if anything the tail gives her a new lease of life and leads to a relationship with the young medic who does her x-rays.

In its not very fashionable way "Zoology" is a more serious "Splash" and "The Shape of Water", Russian-style. As the unlikely lovers both Natalya Pavlenkova and Dmitriy Groshev are excellent but the material itself is a lot thinner than Natasha's tail. This is a one-joke film in which the joke was never funny to begin with. It's certainly not writer/director Ivan I Tverkovskiy's idea we should feel sorry for Natasha though perhaps her metamorphosis into an overnight sex-symbol is going a bit far. It's a hard film to dislike but it is also decidedly minor.