Aside from one striking shot—a gravel road strewn with blood-red apples—little about Schizo has been aestheticized. First-time director Guka Omarova and her co-screenwriter Sergey Bodrov have made a low-rent film about low-rent people hustling for money and recreation in a desolate corner of Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic that runs almost the length of Russia. Schizo takes place in the east, and is filled with characters who look almost East Asian, though they make clear distinctions between themselves and the Chinese, whose life across the border is completely different, and in some ways preferable.
Schizo stars Olzhas Nusuppaev as a teenage high-school dropout who takes a job recruiting boxers for his mother's mobbed-up boyfriend, Eduard Tabyschev. When one of those recruits dies, Nusuppaev takes money to the dead man's girl, Olga Landina, who has a young son and a stack of bills. Nusuppaev starts hanging around Landina more and more, turning himself into a junior version of Tabyschev, aping his tough-guy poses and patronage of desperate single mothers. Except that when Nusuppaev is alone with Landina's kid, he surreptitiously pockets a toy car.
Though it's equally concerned with sensitive young criminals in squalid communities, Schizo is no City Of God, for better and worse. Omarova keeps the pace slow and the explanations minimal; the illegal boxing matches that drive the story pop up without warning about a third of the way through the film. It's kind of surprising, then, that Schizo develops a potboiler plot right at the end, and even more disappointing that Omarova resolves it with callousness and violence, like the stylish American independent drama that Schizo most pointedly isn't. Still, the murder that precedes that snazzy shot of apple-strewn gravel is smartly staged, revealed through sound design alone, and Omarova artfully portrays Nusuppaev's lack of options through multiple long shots of empty landscapes dotted with collapsing hovels. Halfway through the film, when Nusuppaev suddenly hops on a passenger train, it's a wonder that he doesn't just keep on riding it.