‘Convenience Store’ Review: Ripped-From-Headlines Drama Uncovers Modern Slaves in Plain Sight

variety.com:

Michael Nordine authorAnyone who’s ever scoffed at a company referring to its employees as family will immediately hear alarm bells ringing when Zhanna (Lyudmila Vasilyeva), the matriarch who runs Produkty 24, tells her workers they aren’t just employees, they’re her children.

It won’t take long for “Convenience Store” to justify that skepticism and then some: A highlight of the 2022 Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama program, Michael Borodin’s look at an Uzbek immigrant working in the Moscow outskirts is all the more disturbing for the fact that it’s based on a real case of human trafficking.The marriage of Mukkahabat (a gently devastating Zukhara Sanzysbay) to a fellow worker is our entree into this world, but it’s hardly a storybook wedding.

Taking place in a backroom of Produkty 24, it feels more like a forced union than the beginning of happily ever after. Flickering lights and loud music meant to mask whatever might be going on in that and other backrooms belie the store’s clean surface, as do the clerks’ hesitance to let a customer poke around when he hears what sounds like a woman in distress.

We soon come to see Produkty 24 as a kind of prison, one where the second half of its name is as ominous as it is descriptive: Mukhabbat and the others live here, meaning they’re under its roof (and, more to the point, Zhanna’s thrall) 24 hours a day.