It is a truth universally acknowledged that locations with a closing time are intriguing for what happens after the lights go off. These liminal spaces—shuttered in darkness, empty of patrons, silent as a grave—compel our interest because of their inaccessibility, tempting our desire to know what occurs while no one is looking. The unassuming doll walks about her room while the child is asleep; ghosts abound in an abandoned house; statues come to life at the museum.
In Supermarket (2023), a Montenegrin film directed by Nemanja Becanovic, our mysterious space is the grocery store, at once a sinister, beguiling, and amusing setting for a film that equally embodies those mesmerizing qualities. The film premiered at the 2023 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and was included in the 2025 International Feature Film Festival (IFFF) programming throughout February. IFFF included 2024 and 2025 entries to the Academy Awards, and Supermarket was Montenegro’s unselected Oscar submission for the 97th Academy Awards, which will take place on March 2, 2025.
Supermarket’s anonymous inhabitant is a man whose daily routine begins near midnight and includes his often inconspicuous use of the store’s food, cosmetics, or magazines. Our mostly nameless narrator—whose sunken eyes suggest a history of many nights like the one we will witness—jogs through the store, performs yoga wearing a face mask, and straightens out the store he calls his home. When he realizes someone else might be in the store with him, that unsteady concept of his calling it “home” comes loose, crumbles, and disintegrates.
Portrayed by Bojan Zirovic, the man’s isolation plays almost exclusively in silence. The dialogue-free opening 30 minutes are brilliantly constructed and paced, lingering in Zirovic’s character’s methodical routine. He wears a long-sleeve shirt that bears a rectangular price tag; his use of the store’s food includes only the most careful of spoonfuls, while he uses a utensil with the bar code sticker.
We never learn why the man decides to live in the supermarket—or why a blurry figure of a woman (Ana Pejovic) haunts him—but the excess of his surroundings creates an ironic counterpoint to his conservative use of the items. His “kingdom,” as the film’s description calls it, is a paradise of bounty, but not one over which he has unbound jurisdiction. The man exercises his limited free will under a need to remain unseen, and this essential tension of the film makes it a compelling study of survival as quotidian existence.
Then odd things happen. Off-screen, a jar of pickles soars from its nestled spot on the shelf to the tiled floor. Later, an animatronic dog toy with diabolical laser-red eyes yips and shuffles around the aisle; a remote-controlled toy car zips toward the man’s feet, then scurries away, the person who controls it unknown.
In these sequences, the score rears its head, a haunting drone that resembles the usual cacophony of a grocery store: the hum of a refrigerator or the whipping of a fan. Later, when a man named Robert (Branimir Popovic) reveals himself as the perpetrator of these events—and their dialogue assumes its typical storytelling role—the dread of the score finds its target in the realization of Robert’s own hidden life in the supermarket. Though sometimes effective, the score more often imbues the film with a sense of unnecessary dread that the imagery of the empty, well-stocked store and Zirovic’s acting already conveys.
The man’s companionship with Robert veers toward the absurd, a turn not entirely unwelcome but one that fails to match the enthralling and meditative opening half. With Robert’s manifestation, surveillance itself becomes the film’s vexing, unseen villain. The unblinking camera eyes the men with curiosity or passivity as their evening careens violently into the night. Meanwhile, the cinematography parallels the perspective of the surveillance cameras that dot the supermarket’s ceiling. The film’s elongated takes further assert this atmosphere of secrecy, surreality, and complicity; not only do we learn what that mysterious interim between the store’s opening and closing would be like, but it also reminds us of our watchful role in the men’s journey.
While formally the film excels, it also leaves us with conventional, less interesting questions of narrative: Whose perspective should we trust? How reliable are these characters? How much of this was real? And while the film’s final shot throws the events of the evening into a new light, perhaps providing an elusive answer to these questions, it’s not necessarily a surprising or stirring conclusion.
Yet, for its flaws, Supermarket still contains a quiet story worth our attention—and certainly more so than another prominent absurdist selection in this year’s Oscar in Best International Feature. And perhaps those questions of perspective will intrigue you more I found them to be; perhaps your watchful eyes caught something else, lurking among the shelves.
Review Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers
Feature Image Courtesy of RTCG via IMDb