Amid a churning torrent of acid gold, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Void unveils its true form, slipping away from its preambulatory parable into something wholly incantatory. This displacement arrives unhurriedly; in fact, so gradual is its presence, and so glacial are its frames, that image and narrative paradoxically reunite and coalesce into one. The film’s premise may be stated as follows: a sojourner named Shah Ismail (Huseyn Nasirov) seeks the Water of Life, and sets out across unrelenting terrain in search of it. His journey, however, charts less a path to spiritual enlightenment than it advances a stark proposition both metaphysical and aesthetic. “The first sign of Truth,” Ismail’s entranced voice booms unseen, “is realizing that all metaphors are real.” What therefore ensues is very much a reality in its own right, of communion, discovery, and eventual dissolution — of the body, the mind, and the soul.
The third entry in an unofficial film cycle, Sermon to the Void sees Baydarov at his most inventive and conceptually daring, employing a visual language of incandescent color and abstraction. Where its predecessors flirted with the oblique rhythms of poetic meter to lament the hollow costs of war, Void, in comparison, openly mounts a battle hymn for the cause of poetry. Streaked with euphoric shades of blue and green and doused in the deep-fried ochers of red and yellow, the film surveys a personal katabasis of alien contours and landscapes, each one an enticingly associative and unreal composition of flowers, fields, landforms, and figures. All verisimilitude with historical fact is expunged and replaced by an atemporal desolation more vivid and pronounced than Baydarov’s previous works: In Between Dying (2020), his most well-known film, loosely distilled the violent national id of post-Soviet Azerbaijan amid ravishing symbolism, whereas in Sermon to the Fish (2022) and Sermon to the Birds (2023) the aftermath of devastation from the Nagorno-Karabakh wars forecloses any hope for salvation. In contrast, Void flits between the free-flowing impulses of myth and the restrained sanctum of contemplation, making a case for the sacredness of both.
Baydarov’s influences clearly range over the old masters of sublimity: the hallucinatory tinctures of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, as with the elliptical portraitures of Sergei Parajanov’s Ashik Kerib, complement a languid sensibility courtesy of both Béla Tarr (the director’s mentor) and Carlos Reygadas (one of the film’s co-producers). But equally noteworthy is Void’s existential hunger, echoing the phantasmatic plunge of the ego in Abel Ferrara’s Siberia and more so in the unearthly spectacles of Jean Giraud’s comic book Arzach. Both comparisons arguably situate the film on the precipice of being, harboring the silhouette of an elusive protagonist who traverses the terra incognita of his soul. “Perhaps the goal is union with You,” proclaims an epigraph from the 16th-century poet Füzuli. Much in Void does point toward the cosmic as Ismail, alongside his intermittent fellow travelers, wanders and wonders about the barren and indifferent spaces, themselves devoid of other creatures but filled with the absoluteness of the spoken word.
Yet the cosmic isn’t necessarily construed at face value here, for Baydarov’s frequent invocation of cryptic phrases (the “morality of the wheat,” the “curse of the yellow” etc.) seem almost deliberately obfuscatory. As shorthands for the devotional language of love, however, they present a compelling injunction to faith, religious, secular, or otherwise. Ismail’s search for life’s elixir is no more literal than the piety of practicing believers, and though its scintillating mud-oranges recall the fiery purification of Zoroastrianism, Sermon to the Void could also be read as a Buddhist mantra on the illusory self. Wisely, it preaches not earthly wisdom but divine love — a long-standing theme in the director’s oeuvre — and, in so doing, stands as a testament to the irreducibility of art. Cause may falter, effect may flounder; where the fish and birds vivify a nature now hidden, the void discloses from its depths the yearnings of the human heart.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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