If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be trapped in a 2-hour disciplinary hearing about the moral decay of society—held in a freezing Kazakh hallway lit by one flickering bulb—Cadet has you covered.
Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s 2024 horror film plants itself in an elite military academy, fills it with bullying, ghosts, and Soviet hangover imagery… and then just keeps going, and going, for 126 very stern minutes.
Welcome to Trauma School
The setup sounds promising on paper:
Alina, a history teacher and single mother, moves with her son Serik to a remote military academy in Kazakhstan. He’s sensitive, “girlish,” and, therefore, clearly doomed in a place designed to manufacture future war machines. He’s bullied, humiliated, and gaslit by both students and staff, while Alina clings to the fantasy that this “prestigious” school will save his future instead of pulverizing it.
Then a student’s bloody corpse turns up, a detective shows up, and Serik is implicated. After that, he suddenly transforms into a model cadet: rigid posture, perfect discipline, eyes like he’s been spiritually lobotomized. Alina’s maternal spidey-sense finally notices that maybe “rapid personality change after a murder” is not a healthy growth spurt.
There’s a haunted basement, hints of supernatural influence, and an investigator who eventually stops rolling his eyes long enough to join mother and son in exploring the school’s dark underbelly—literally and metaphorically.
It should be chilling. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of being stuck in compulsory school assembly: you understand the message is Important, but you mostly just want to go home.
Social Allegory With a Sledgehammer
Yerzhanov is a respected Kazakh auteur, known for bleak, stylised dramas set in his fictional Karatas universe, blending social critique and genre elements. In Cadet, he turns the academy into a symbol of “spiritus sovieticus,” where generations are forged into obedient monsters via architecture, ritual, and institutional violence.
That’s all very clever—on the page. On the screen, it’s like being cornered at a party by someone who wants to explain how all schools are prisons, all authority is fascism, and by the way, ghosts are metaphors for historical guilt.
There’s zero subtlety. Corridors loom. Whistles shriek. Cadets march like soulless clones. The headmaster might as well introduce himself as Colonel Toxic Masculinity. Every scene feels designed to shout “SYSTEMIC INJUSTICE!” directly into your face, then pause so you can appreciate how deep that is.
Yes, the academy is abusive. Yes, it’s a meat grinder for vulnerable boys. Yes, trauma reproduces itself. After the tenth slow shot of Serik being brutalized while the walls practically drip metaphor, you start wishing the ghost would just file a concise report and let everyone go.
Horror That Forgot to Be Scary
The film has been described as Yerzhanov leaning more into horror, drawing inspiration from J-horror and ghost stories. Unfortunately, the horror here mostly consists of:
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Dim lighting
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Dead-eyed cadets
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Occasional apparitions
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And that ominous basement everyone keeps talking about
There are supernatural touches—warnings from a parent who’s later revealed to be dead, strange forces seemingly reshaping Serik, a sense that the school itself is haunted by accumulated violence.
But instead of dread, what you get is a slow academic essay in horror cosplay. The scares are so deeply buried under metaphor and long takes that they barely register as scares at all. The investigator finally going downstairs with Alina and Serik should be a white-knuckle descent into hell; it feels more like an off-site meeting.
If you advertise “military academy horror mystery” and what you deliver is “light J-horror seasoning on top of a lecture about evil,” don’t be surprised when audiences show up expecting The Faculty and get a term paper.
126 Minutes in the Cold
At just over two hours, Cadet is not long by epic standards, but it feels like it’s on military time.
The pacing is glacial. We watch the same beats loop repeatedly:
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Serik gets bullied or humiliated.
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Alina frets, confronts someone, gets stonewalled.
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The detective shrugs off supernatural explanations.
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The headmaster acts like a cartoon of institutional cruelty.
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Something vaguely weird happens in or near the basement.
Repeat until the runtime achieves the approximate emotional texture of permafrost.
To be fair, some critics have called it “competent” and praised its craftsmanship while noting it doesn’t reach Yerzhanov’s previous heights. That’s a polite way of saying: well-made, but feels like homework.
Characters or Case Studies?
Anna Starchenko, as Alina, does solid work as the exhausted, increasingly horrified mother who realizes the system she trusted is devouring her child. Critics have praised her chemistry with Sharip Serik (Serik), and you can see why: their scenes together occasionally spark with something raw and real.
But the script treats them less like people and more like instruments. Alina is the “good” desperately seeking a foothold in a world of institutional evil. Serik is the fragile innocence being reshaped into something monstrous. These are ideas wearing human faces.
The investigator, who supposedly shifts from skepticism to belief as supernatural events mount, never quite escapes “plot device with a badge.” The other cadets are interchangeable tormentors. The staff members are various shades of authoritarian ghoul.
It all works as allegory. It doesn’t work so well if you came in hoping to care about literally anyone as a human being rather than a walking thesis.
Pretty Misery
Here’s the frustrating part: the film looks good. Yerkinbek Pturaliyev’s cinematography has been singled out as one of the strongest aspects, capturing the academy’s suffocating architecture with grim artistry. The wide shots of snow-covered grounds and oppressive interiors do an excellent job of making you feel like this place was built to kill hope.
But after an hour of beautifully composed gloom, you start to realize you’re basically watching an art installation on the theme “What if school, but cursed?” You can admire the frame and still quietly resent the fact that nothing emotionally new is happening inside it.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of a gorgeous prison cell. Yes, the lighting is lovely. No, you still can’t leave.
The Oscar That Wasn’t
In a move that says a lot about how thin the year must have been, Cadet was chosen as Kazakhstan’s submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 98th Academy Awards—only to not make the Academy’s accepted list.
On one hand, you can see why they picked it: serious themes, festival pedigree (Tokyo, Berlin, Karlovy Vary), “post-horror” vibes, sociopolitical bite. On the other hand, you can also see why the Academy looked at 126 minutes of institutional misery with light ghosting and went, “We’re good, thanks.”
Horror, But for Committees
None of this makes Cadet an outright disaster. It’s too competently made and too thematically focused for that. The problem is more insidious: it’s horror designed to impress programmers, not to haunt viewers.
If you’re a festival programmer or critic who thrives on bleak allegory and doesn’t mind that the “horror” mostly happens in footnotes, this might feel profound. If you’re a regular horror fan who heard “military academy haunted by the past” and got excited for something tense, scary, or even a little fun… well, enjoy your two-hour guided tour of systemic evil, featuring one mildly haunted basement.
In the end, Cadet is like a very strict teacher who confiscates your phone, pulls down the blinds, and says, “Today we’re going to talk about the nature of evil.” Halfway through, you’re staring at the door, thinking: you know what? I’d rather take my chances with the Burned Ones.
At least they’d get to the point.
