Amerikatsi (2022)
Directed by Michael A. Goorjian
The trouble with Amerikatsi is that it wants to be both whimsical and tragic, and while those two impulses don’t necessarily cancel each other out, they can pull a film apart at the seams. Michael Goorjian, wearing all the hats—writer, director, star—throws himself into the role of a man trapped in Soviet-era Armenia, but he seems equally trapped by the movie’s reluctance to commit to a single tone. This is a film that wants to be a fable, a parable, and a hard-nosed historical drama all at once. The result is an experience that’s at turns charming, frustrating, and curiously weightless.
The setup is promising: an Armenian-American named Charlie (Goorjian) returns to Armenia in 1948, part of a wave of diaspora repatriation spurred on by the Soviet promise of a homeland reborn. But it’s a bait-and-switch. He’s quickly arrested on absurd charges—his Western mannerisms alone are practically a crime—and shipped off to a prison in Yerevan. From his cell, he can see into the home of a Soviet official (Hovik Keuchkerian), and, like James Stewart in Rear Window, he begins to live vicariously through the domestic life unfolding before him.
That’s a potent premise, and there are moments when Amerikatsi plays like a silent film comedy mixed with the pathos of solitary confinement. Charlie, deprived of company, mimics the gestures of the man in the apartment. He pantomimes cooking, toasting, dancing. These moments have a playful, Chaplinesque quality—poignant but light, a man clinging to life through make-believe. Goorjian the director stages these sequences with tenderness, and for a while, the film carries the exhilaration of an idea that’s really working.
But the movie doesn’t stay in that space. It wants to be a broader, more “important” film, and as it begins incorporating the realities of Stalinist oppression, it starts to lurch. The humor of Charlie’s mimed existence clashes with the sudden brutality of the regime around him. When Goorjian tries to merge these elements—like when Charlie, still trapped, is able to subtly influence the Soviet man’s life from his cell—the film feels too sentimental for its own good. It softens the horror of what’s happening. The conditions of the prison are harsh, but the film presents them in a way that makes it seem like Charlie is enduring a quirky misadventure rather than a nightmare.
Goorjian himself has an easy likability, which serves him well in the film’s lighter moments but works against him when Amerikatsi leans into tragedy. His Charlie is more of an observer than an active participant, a dreamer who watches but rarely intervenes. That might be the point—his only power is to endure—but it makes him feel oddly passive in a story that demands more urgency. His connection to the Soviet official’s family is entirely one-sided, and while the movie seems to suggest that Charlie’s presence somehow alters the course of their lives, it’s never convincing. These people are going to meet their fates regardless of the man watching from his cell.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what Amerikatsi wants to be. At times, it flirts with magical realism, presenting Charlie’s survival as something mystical, almost miraculous. Elsewhere, it insists on the cold realities of Soviet persecution. The film would be more affecting if it committed fully to either register. Instead, it vacillates. The historical weight of the Armenian experience, the deep wounds of genocide and exile, are undeniably present, but Amerikatsi glides over them in a way that’s too neat, too wrapped in the glow of nostalgia.
There are, of course, pleasures to be had here. The film is beautifully shot, with a warm, golden palette that makes Armenia look impossibly inviting even in its most oppressive moments. Goorjian has a feel for visual storytelling, and some of the movie’s best passages are wordless—just Charlie in his cell, reacting to the life beyond his window. If the whole film had maintained that delicate, near-silent dance of observation and longing, it might have been something special.
Instead, Amerikatsi becomes a more conventional political drama as it progresses, layering in resistance and retribution, but never in a way that feels particularly fresh. The film wants to have its uplift, to assure us that even in the darkest of times, there is joy and connection. That’s a noble sentiment, but here it feels unearned. The final act, where the threads of Charlie’s strange captivity and the lives of the people he watches come together, strains for an emotional catharsis that the film hasn’t quite built up to.
Goorjian deserves credit for crafting a movie that, for all its missteps, has genuine ambition. He’s not content to just tell a straightforward historical tale. He wants to give it an inventive framing device, a storybook quality, a universality. But Amerikatsi never fully reconciles its competing instincts. It’s too playful to be a serious drama, too heavy-handed to be a poetic fable. And in the end, like its main character, it spends too much time watching from a distance rather than fully immersing itself in its own story.
