To approach Andrei Vlasov’s masterpiece The Thirty Eight Steppes without recalling Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps,and Buchan’s novel before it,would be to miss one of its most intriguing intellectual provocations. The resemblance is neither superficial nor accidental: Vlasov has stated in interviews that his title is a deliberate counterpoint, an “un-numbering” of the espionage thriller’s famous staircase, reducing it by one, grounding it in earth rather than ascending into intrigue. Where Hitchcock’s masterpiece is a paragon of suspense, all flight and pursuit, Vlasov’s film is its inverse: movement without chase, journey without plot.
Set on the endless Kazakh steppe in the late 19th century, The Thirty Eight Steppes follows Sanzhar, a taciturn horseman guiding a group of exiled families across vast landscapes. Each “steppe” represents a stage in their passage, a ritual of endurance rather than a clue in a mystery. If Buchan’s novel stages the fantasy of individual agency,one man outwitting a web of conspirators,Vlasov dismantles the very premise of agency. Here, the landscape absorbs human effort, rendering the travelers’ fate less the result of will than of elemental indifference.
The film’s relation to Hitchcock is most potent in its treatment of suspense. Where Hitchcock tightens narrative screws, wringing anxiety from every glance and gesture, Vlasov cultivates a slow, almost geological dread. The audience is not concerned with whether Sanzhar will outpace his pursuers but rather whether he, or anyone, will leave a trace upon a terrain that resists inscription. The tension is existential, not narrative.
Cinematically, the contrast is stark. Hitchcock framed his story in brisk montage and witty dialogue, designed for popular delight. Vlasov lingers: 10-minute takes of horses inching through snow, the wind eroding language itself into murmurs and silences. The soundtrack is composed of storms, hoofbeats, and Sofia Erdenko’s avant-garde cello, which transforms dissonance into landscape.
If The 39 Steps dramatized the anxiety of modernity,the individual caught in networks of conspiracy and surveillance,The Thirty Eight Steppes turns its gaze backward, to a pre-modern threshold where the individual scarcely exists as such. Sanzhar is less protagonist than witness, a figure dissolving into ritual, into myth, into dust. Where Hitchcock’s stairwell ascends toward resolution, Vlasov’s plains stretch outward into ambiguity.
This is not to say that Vlasov repudiates Hitchcock entirely. Rather, he refracts him. The Thirty Eight Steppes is what happens when you subtract from Hitchcock’s architecture of suspense the scaffolding of plot and urban modernity, leaving only the raw materials: journey, danger, uncertainty. It is Hitchcock’s “steps” made horizontal, scattered across earth rather than climbing toward revelation.
The film will undoubtedly divide audiences: some will find its 163 minutes of silence and slow movement a provocation bordering on parody; others will experience it as a rare cinematic pilgrimage, a work that asks us to sit with endurance, with history, with the impossibility of inscription upon the infinite.
In the end, The Thirty Eight Steppes may be less a film than a response,a meditation on what cinema becomes when it renounces suspense yet retains its structure. If The 39 Steps made the chase a metaphor for modern life, The Thirty Eight Steppes makes endurance its own form of suspense: the drama of continuing at all.
