This is a review from the Venice Film Festival of DAU, the latest instalment in Ilya Khrzhanovsky's sprawling, controversial Soviet-era film and multimedia project, which finally puts its central figure, physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, at the heart of the story. Unlike earlier spin-offs such as DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration, where Landau was a peripheral presence, this film offers a more conventional biopic structure, tracing his genius, infidelities and moral entanglement with Soviet weapons research, though it retains the project's characteristic surreal and disorienting visual style.

The reviewer notes that Landau, or "Dau", is played by Greek-Russian musician Teodor Currentzis as a brilliant but melancholy theoretical physicist whose extramarital affairs humiliate his wife Nora and whose principled objection to weapons work brings him into conflict with a menacing KGB officer. He is ultimately pressured into bomb research by his friend Krupitsa, a fictionalised version of real scientist Pyotr Kapitsa, whom he later betrays. The critic calls the film "mad, daunting, haunting" and marvels at how the vast, sexually explicit and commercially unconventional Dau project has managed to exist at all, describing it as an enigma and an adventure.