Co producers are Valentina Mikhaleva, Galina Sementseva, Lev Karakhan, Gunnar Dedio, Uljana Kim, Peter Warnier, Marc van Warmerdam and Serge Lanrenyuk.

The website's critical consensus states, "A Gentle Creature isn't an easy watch, but this grim look at modern Russia's bureaucratic nightmare offers rich, thought-provoking rewards.

[7] "A Gentle Creature is a brutally realist movie – at least at first – that takes its heroine on a pilgrimage into the vast, trackless forest of national suffering.

Yet it does this with an unsettling, accelerating pattern of eerie coincidences and echoes, which finally mutates into a kind of satirical expressionism – a set-piece flourish which some might consider a bit of a narrative evasion or even an undermining of that basis of authenticity on which we had understood the movie.

His portrait of Russia at the Revolution's centenary depicts a civil society that collapsed long ago and whose citizens are too shattered to care."

Only tenuously related to the Dostoyevsky story of the same name and the 1969 film adaptation of that source material by Robert Bresson, this harrowing tale revolves around a stoical unnamed woman (Vasilina Makovtseva) stuck in a nightmarish Siberian prison town.