Surprising

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2014)

I heard this was a great anti-war film and that it was brutal.
Compared to a slasher movie not at all brutal. And I'm not sure it was anti-war, but more a grim picaresque story in the middle of conflict.
I loved the stumbling from one bizarre scene to the next. That makes it better than Private Ryan - in that film there's one scene where the soldiers come across a family living on the top floor of a house that's been cut in half, open to the elements, and I remember wishing there were more scenes like it. Come and See is stuffed with that kind of detail, including one with a cow and tracer bullets.
Plus there's quite a lot of humour. One brilliant scene is of a group photo near the beginning full of laughter and energy, then a weird sequence with an effigy of Hitler made from a skull, a German police officer who basically acts like a rodeo clown, a dotty old woman who smiles when the killers leave her alive for breeding, and plenty of earthy jokes.
So it comes across with a touch of the hallucinations. But then the action scenes are obviously very dangerous for the actors, so that creates a sense of reality. You can see that in the next group scene, when an einsatz squad emerges from the mist to burn down a village. This is the cruellest part of the film, but even then there's great energy and enjoyment amongst the killers - a strange effect.
The story is told entirely from the POV of the young hero, and I'm not sure he carries it off completely. There's an awkward scene between him and Glashsa in the first act, where they really force the laughter. But that's OK, doesn't harm the overall effect.
The soundtrack is mostly excellent: a constant background of eerie, scratchy noises, and some very effective music.
Pity it wasn't shot in widescreen (or did I see a pan & scan version?). The final sequence, while interesting in its reversal of historical scenes, didn't do it for me (although it answers the question, Would you strangle Hitler at birth?), so I should mark it down a point but I won't.
This is powerful, and the humour and the two group scenes will stay with me. So it's a 9.