Come and See

cute sunday afternoon watch! ok i’m abt to yap. that was insane and idek where to start. trying to write a coherent letterboxd review after watching what i’m very sure is one of the most bone chilling pieces i will ever see, like bro. my brain is eggs rn. like scrambled eggs. For me, this movie was not about the scenes of grotesque violence and unsettling imagery (although those are definitely sticking in my head as well). From my perspective, Come and See is a movie about faces. FIyora’s overjoyed expression as he digs through the sand for a rifle, genuinely and innocently EXCITED to enlist in the Belarusian military. The faces of German soldiers laughing as they burn villages down and commit acts that can only be described as what we wish was subhuman. Glasha’s look of horror as she sees the disfigured bodies of war victims who she grew up with, and whose faces are now unrecognizable. The badly burned face of the village elder who tells FIyora of his family’s deaths. The young woman whose fate can be read in her eyes as she escapes from the church, only to be dragged into a truck to be raped. I have genuinely not seen a more disturbing look of fear than the one on FIorya’s face as soldiers hold a gun to his head for a photo-op that is life or death for FIorya, and merely comedic to them. The most important face of this film however, is that of an infant Adolg Hitler’s. Elem Klimov’s main point of this movie is that war and evil are an inevitable part of human nature, and that as much as we like to think the atrocious acts committed are done by inhuman monsters, they’re not. As FIorya hysterically shoots the portrait of Hitler, with Hitler’s life flashing before his eyes, he is unable to shoot once he pictures the infant face. At this point in the movie, FIorya wants nothing more than his innocence back. He is faced with the realization that all humans start out that way, regardless of what lies in store for them and what they will become. The scariest part about this movie for me is how based in realism it is, and how the soldiers laughing as they kill probably just went home to their wives that night and went to sleep no problem. The idea that humans as a species and as a society are not better than that, no matter how we have idealized ourselves, is all too scary and all too real to stomach. cool sound design!!!😁😁😁