Reviews & Ratings for
Нелюбовь (2017)

In 2012 in a city in Leningrad region,[c] children are leaving school. A twelve-year-old boy named Alyosha walks along a path through a wooded area on the outskirts of town. He throws a strip of tape onto a tree. His parents, Zhenya and Boris, are divorcing and are trying to sell their apartment. Both parents have new relationships: Boris with Masha, a young woman who is pregnant with his child; and Zhenya with Anton, an older and wealthier man with an adult daughter. Alyosha overhears a fight between his parents, neither of whom claim to want him and are considering placing him in an orphanage.

One day after spending most of the night with Anton, Zhenya realizes Alyosha has not been seen since the day before. The police believe Alyosha has run away and will return home within a day or two. When Alyosha does not return, a volunteer group specializing in the rescue of missing persons takes over the case and begins searching for the boy. The only relative Alyosha could have sought refuge with is Zhenya's estranged mother, who lives several hours away. Boris and Zhenya visit Zhenya's mother; their trip is punctuated by arguments and they do not find any clues as to Alyosha's whereabouts. On the return journey home, Zhenya and Boris argue again; Zhenya says her marriage to Boris while pregnant was a mistake and she should have had an abortion; she also says she feels pity for Masha. Enraged, Boris stops the car and forces her out on a rural roadway.

The police again become involved with the search for Alyosha, which covers an increasingly wide area of the town and its surrounding area. After a fruitless search of an abandoned building that Alyosha's friend, Kuznetsov, identified as their hideout, Zhenya and Boris go to a morgue to view the remains of an unidentified child whose description matches Alyosha's. Both parents deny the disfigured child's body is their son's, though the experience proves traumatic and they break down in tears.

Some time passes; Boris and Zhenya's apartment has been sold, and workers dismantle wall hangings and appliances in Alyosha's old room. On the streets, missing-person posters of Alyosha are looking old and faded. In 2015, Boris now lives with Masha and their infant son, whom he treats coldly, while Zhenya has moved in with Anton. Three years after his disappearance, on the wooded path along which Alyosha used to walk home from school, the strip of tape he threw onto the tree remains as a surviving remnant of his existence.