“You’ll like it here.”Whats Harvey Keitel doing in this Eastern European art film and where did he learn to speak Czech? 🤨 Love the story structure and the progression is really intriguing as it’s told like an old fairytale within a WW2 setting. It’s vile, sadistic and presents some of the most disturbing things human beings got to offer but done with impeccable attention to detail and emphasis on realism and with great use of symbolism. From start to finish this film is punishing but it also has some rather impressive black and white cinematography, incredible landscapes and some really good naturalistic performances from a surprisingly stacked cast. It also includes some amazing homages to other famous war films like; ***Saving Private Ryan, Come and See and Ivan’s Childhood.
***
The movie touches on an array of themes and subjects, everything from: war, religion, animal cruelty, insanity, poverty, culture, sexual violence and the human condition. It’s presented in chapters which exponentially becomes more and more vile and tortuous to sit through and if you thought
Come & See was hard to watch, you should probably skip this
(Aleksei Kravchenko is in this film too btw).** It’s long, slow and Eastern European. It will not be pleasant. I’m not even sure how to categorise it, Is it folk horror or just torture porn? Whatever it is, it’s borderline psychotic.
Overall,This film is unrelenting in its portrayal of cruelty. This is not just a war movie it’s a hideous showing of just how despicable the human race can be under the right circumstances. Its endurance cinema at its finest.
