"Healing", directed by Darja-Kazimira Zimina, defies the confines of traditional cinematic language, emerging as a deeply immersive experience where art becomes ritual and aesthetic transcendence gives way to spiritual exploration. From the first hypnotic sounds echoing like a primordial chant to the imagery steeped in symbolism and emotional weight, the film invites us to traverse realms of shadow, fire, death, and rebirth. There is no linearity, no Cartesian logic to follow everything here is feeling, intuition, and surrender.

The soundtrack, created for Mala Herba, serves as a guide, leading us through a sonic labyrinth that seems to pulse with the universe’s primordial energy. It is not music to be simply heard but inhabited, as if each note were a reverberation of forgotten rituals. This soundscape envelops and transports us to an undefined space-time, where death is not an end but a transformation. Every chord amplifies the sense that we are participants in a rite that surpasses us, something larger and deeper than our individual existences.

Zimina’s imagery, in turn, is pure visual poetry. The camera captures dreamlike landscapes that could just as well be the final visions of someone departing life as the first flickers of consciousness after a long slumber. Everything seems charged with deliberate ambiguity, where beauty and terror coexist. Light and shadow dance in perfect choreography, oscillating between the sublime and the unsettling, while the use of fire, darkness, and natural landscapes creates an atmosphere that is at once magical and visceral. The Buriņu forest, with its tragic history tied to the massacres of World War II, is not just a setting it is a character in itself, a place where the memory of pain and violence echoes in every tree, in every piece of earth. This choice adds a historical depth that amplifies the film’s emotional resonance.

"Healing" ventures into the banal yet inevitable idea of death as part of the healing process not merely physical death, but symbolic death, the kind that marks the end of cycles and the destruction of everything that once was. Grief, pain, and despair permeate every frame, yet there is also a promise of rebirth, of a new beginning that can only emerge after the full acceptance of the end. This duality the end and the beginning, destruction and creation lies at the heart of the film, forcing us to confront what we so often avoid: the transience of all things.

Watching "Healing" is not an easy or comfortable experience. It makes no concessions to the viewer, offering no clear answers or comforting resolutions. But for those willing to surrender to its sensory and symbolic narrative, the film offers something rare: a profound and visceral meditation on the nature of transformation. It is a hymn to life, paradoxically sung through the acceptance of death. Darja-Kazimira Zimina delivers here a work of rare power, unbounded by genres or conventions, and for that very reason, it inscribes itself in the soul like a dream or perhaps, like a memory.