Synopsis
Forbidden Empire (2014) is a fantasy horror you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Oleg Stepchenko and based on Nikolai Gogol's 1835 tale "Viy." British cartographer Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng) gets lost in the Carpathians in the early 1700s and rides into a Cossack settlement that has dug itself a moat and shut the world out.
Green is a man of maps and reason. He wants a rational explanation for everything he sees — the locked doors, the flinching at the treeline, the villagers who answer every question with a question. Alexei Chadov and Agnia Ditkovskyte play locals who may or may not be telling him the whole truth, and Flemyng carries the film's sceptical core right up to the moment the ground shifts.
Shot as a five-country co-production (Russia, UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine), the film was the first wide-release Russian 3D horror. Stepchenko takes significant liberties with Gogol, which is either the point or the problem depending on how you feel about the source. Stream Forbidden Empire online on iFILM.
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