The Year’s First Great Film Is This Harrowing Abortion Drama

A naked inhuman creature stands in the inky dark. Its skin wrinkled, its flesh-covered face devoid of eyes, a nose, or a mouth, and its breaths heavy and rhythmic. It slowly turns and walks away to the unrelated (or is it?) sound of laughing children.

April provides no context for this monstrous opening vision, nor for the ensuing images of rain pelting the ground and an unseen figure wading through waist-deep water, the lush treetops reflected in its surface. Yet over the course of its tale, these sights come to resonate as surrealistic manifestations of the anguish and alienation of its central character—and, by extension, her many countrywomen.

A standout on last year’s festival circuit that’s now the best new feature of 2025, April—which showed at the Sundance Film Festival, and was produced by Luca Guadagnino—is an alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) harrowing and hallucinatory story of an OB-GYN who discovers that her every attempt at nurturing life leads only to more death.

Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the top obstetrician at a remote Georgia hospital, and following the aforementioned out-there prologue, Beginning writer/director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore feature cuts abruptly to an overhead shot of her delivering a baby. The agony of this (extremely real and graphic) scene is compounded by its conclusion, with the infant exiting her mother colorless and soundless.

“He’s not crying,” the woman states. Afterwards in her boss’ (Merab Ninidze) office, Nina is compelled to answer for the newborn boy’s death, all as the deceased’s father stares at her with seething fury and her colleague David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) vainly strives to support her.

Left alone together, the grieving man tells Nina that he knows she performs illegal abortions in the surrounding village. “You are a murderer,” he spits, and though Nina doesn’t agree with that assessment, subsequent glimpses of her alone and unclothed in her apartment suggest that she’s nonetheless in torment.

In these and numerous other compositions, director Kulumbegashvili situates Nina and David off-center, creating a sense of disarray that’s amplified by her frequent use of uniquely disorienting shots that appear to be from the POV of her characters, but then reveal themselves to be from a third-person perspective. Her camera often bobbing and moving as if assuming the position of a human’s eyes, and then stopping to allow said person to wander into the frame, the director unsettles via shifting, bewildering formalism.

On a rural road at night, Nina drives to nowhere until she spots a man shrouded in gloom whom she gives a ride. Once he’s in the car, she offers him oral sex, to which he agrees. However, he fails to become aroused, inspiring Nina to touch herself and ask him to “lick” her—at which point he suddenly, violently smashes her head into the steering wheel and window. In this bracing drama, the quest for pleasure leads to pain, the search for connection results in solitude, and the desire to help women through gynecological care—both of the sanctioned and unsanctioned kind—does little to alleviate their suffering and, in some cases, gravely exacerbates it.

Over the course of her ordeal, Nina confesses that her sister never visits her (she’s too busy spending her free time vacationing in Europe) and tells David—who once wanted to marry her, and now has a wife and child—that, for ambiguous and unconvincing reasons, they never would have worked as a couple.

A strain of oppressive despondency courses through April, and so too do shame, guilt, rage, and fear, the last of which hangs in the air when Nina visits the home of Mzia (Ana Nikolava) to discuss the suspected pregnancy of her daughter. As later becomes clear, this girl is deaf and mute as well as with child, and during a second visit, Nina performs an abortion—a procedure that Kulumbegashvili shoots in a single real-time take, the camera pointed at the teen’s mid-section as her body writhes in discomfort and her mother, standing by her side, whispers calming reassurances while strongly clutching her arm.

In long, unbroken scenes marked by unsteady cinematography, Nina struggles to do right by her patients, such as a 16-year-old bride who isn’t ready to have children and to whom Nina gives birth control pills that, she cautions, must remain secret—for both their safety. April rarely depicts overt misogyny and yet the sexist pressures weighing down upon its main character are omnipresent. Kulumbegashvili vacillates between Nina’s arduous day-to-day and unreal moments involving the faceless creature, be it staring down at a person lying on a couch or sharing a borderline-slow-motion embrace with David. It’s easy to view this being as a visual representation of Nina’s inner condition. However, the director spells nothing out; her horrific tableaus simply evoke that which is unspoken, and that additionally goes for a protracted view of a monumental storm forming above a field of flowers, the darkening sky engulfed by a cloud of apocalyptic proportions.

The silent pauses between words are deafening in April, and Sukhitashvili embodies Nina with a stone-faced expression that seems ready, at any moment, to burst into tears or screams. Her performance is modulated, taut, and incredibly moving, conveying the depths of Nina’s unalleviated despair.

Scored to environmental sounds that, by the midway point, come to take on greater meaning (such as a ceaseless cacophony of canine barking), the film presents a hellscape of dead ends for its women, who are stymied from achieving (literal or figurative) escape from the forces preying upon them—a state of affairs epitomized by Nina, post-abortion, having to seek help from Mzia and her intimidating husband (David Beradze) after her car gets stuck in the mud. Even a nocturnal cattle market is defined by these dynamics, with intimidating masculinity everywhere and a female cow standing—alarmed and defiant—over her calf.

April doesn’t resolve its misery, all of which culminates with the dire fallout from Nina’s actions; instead, it closes on a beguiling note of aged pain amidst blooming beauty. A reverie of intolerance and, also, the inability to affect meaningful change through selfless compassion, Kulumbegashvili’s latest delivers a dismaying chill that crawls under the skin and into one’s bones.