Never Gonna Snow Again takes on big, existential questions (think climate change, the divide between rich and poor, the long-term effects of living under a communist regime). But it’s also funny, strange, hypnotic, and simple as oftentimes it might just be encouraging one to ask, "How great is the power of a massage?" 

The story centers on Zhenia (Alec Utgoff); a young, fit, handsome masseur living in government housing in Ukraine, who every day trudges across the border to a wealthy gated community to give massages to an eclectic group of residents with strange, buried traumas hiding just below the surface of their skin.

Filmmaking duo Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert based the story on someone they know personally, and Englert said he was fascinated with massage as a profession.

"That’s the person that knows a lot of secrets. We thought that these sessions is kind of becoming a part of something more — a kind of modern confession," he said.

"Of course that was just a starting point. We wanted to tell much more story and that’s why we located the community in a gated area with the rest of our characters’ tendencies in the world; we wanted to fulfill his character with the melancholy we have in us ... all our memories and dreams."

With the story set in a part of the world that is often in the shadow of communism, it’s hard not to wonder if Zhenia could be an allegory for healing a political divide, but Szumowska insists it’s much more of an allegory or metaphor for longing and spirituality, and often longing for the past.

"For the things we remember when we are kids. Childhood is a very safe time. It’s more of a metaphor of that," she said.

Either way, Zhenia is undeniably healing for all those he visits. From a woman struggling as a newly widowed mother, to the housewife who drinks too much and struggles to hold onto her beauty, to the man who is known as the neighborhood bad guy, Zhenia’s hands bring a magical power for his clients in the visually arresting neighborhood that shoots up like a treeless eyesore in an otherwise older, more traditional-looking town. 

The filmmakers searched high and low to find a gated community to serve as this center for Zhenia to journey into.

"We were looking for quite a bit of time for the perfect location," Englert said. 

"It’s also not easy to get access in the suburbs of Warsaw. We had to pretend we were potential buyers, so we used this trick to sneak in. Eventually, we convinced the authorities to get permission to shoot and we are very happy with how it turned out."

Szumowska continued: "The neighborhood depicts the tendency to the American dream, which is quite common here. The memory of life under communism is strong and there is a need to become something better and this kind of gated community makes people feel isolated and safe (and a sense of wealth), having a better life in the sense of materials. But as we see in the story, it’s not filling the gap; which is needing something more, and connected to sensitivity and the soul."

For those who dwell behind the gates, Zhenia then becomes a symbol of perhaps exactly what they think they are missing. Did the filmmakers put as much mythical power on their protagonist as their characters did?

"We are leaving the room for the interpretation or belief that he has them, or doesn’t have any powers at all," Szumowska said.

"Or maybe he’s a cheater, or people just believe that he has these powers. I do think he has that kind of energy, but just how much is hard to say." 

There is an interesting origin story for Zhenia: that perhaps he got his powers at his place of birth, the radioactive Chernobyl. Englert acknowledged that he’s met people that just transmit a special something.

"I think with Zhenia and his customers it might just be the quest of being totally present," he said. 

In a world full of traumatic distractions, the idea of being totally present is a beautiful notion. Of course, not even Zhenia can totally escape the trauma of his own past, but it seems his own belief in himself might give him the chance, even if the idea itself is a fraud.

"We all won’t get to that kind of place. Instead, I think we can adapt to live with trauma," Szumowska said.

"In that way, Zhenia is a modern lie. Maybe the biggest lie of modern day is that we can heal our traumas, because we cannot. We need to learn to live with them instead of paying thousands of dollars for therapy that might create even different problems and traumas. Trauma is everywhere."

The idea that healing trauma is a modern-day lie is certainly a theme in the film; so then can a person like Zhenia even exist?

Englert chimed in with his philosophy: "He can be real, but not necessarily is. He is everything — longing for something good and bad. He’s the devil and god, and an angel. He is everything. When we have all these cravings and desires, sometimes we are unconscious of what we really want. He is mirroring all these cravings. For each person he is something else."

In Englert and Szumowska’s gated Poland, an often treeless landscape does not look particularly cold. In fact, Zhenia likes to take off a tight turtleneck to give his massages sleeveless (which not only shows his commanding power over his clients, but also suggests that in this heavily brown landscape, he’s just too hot otherwise). In the first act of the film, the daughter of Zhenia’s wine and anxiety-riddled housewife client looks at Zhenia pointedly from atop the toilet and states plainly, "It’s never gonna snow again."

For the souls populating the barren, brown and gated landscape, it does feel as though they are literally thirsty; thirsty for answers, for relief from their trauma, for fewer secrets, for anything new to break the banalities of everyday life. They finally get it in a glorious payoff scene that does indeed bring the snow.

"There is absolutely a longing for the winter, and for the snow ... a hope that there is something — it’s hard to say what exactly it is — but for something bigger than they are, and that we are all a part of this bigger thing. Snow always kind of gives healing," Szumowska said.

The trance-like vision that Never Gonna Snow Again often portrays gives both a lovely and disturbing meditation on the human condition, and that in and of itself is healing indeed.