Horrific & Stunning - a Masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (13 July 2011)

Absolute cinematic masterpiece.This soviet era surrealistic WWII film follows Florya, a young boy who lives in a village in Belorus, as he attempts to join up with Soviet partisan forces during Nazi occupation. What follows is perhaps immeasurable and describable by words. In one of the most vivid, haunting, and probably best war films ever made, we follow Florya as he experiences the psychological horrors and grim, horrific realities of ordinary people and their lives on the brutal Eastern front. In a film which is a masterwork of soviet era expressionism, nightmarish surrealism with vivid images which will become burned into your mind, Come & See is far from the heroic, romantic war cinema of (great) films like Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, or even the stunning Longest Day. Hell, this superb masterpiece even makes Das Boot or A Bridge Too Far look like light-hearted romanticism. This film is a haunting nightmarish opera, absolutely overflowing in its creative genius and vision and technical proficiency. Cinematography is stunning. So many bold, mindblowing images, horrific scenes of Einsatzgruppen brutality are given a poetic beauty to them, while cameras flow intricately through them. Burning villages, savage slaughterings, soldiers emerging from the woods like ghosts and hysterical, blaring crowds pleading for mercy - this film weaves them all with godly precision. The music intertwined with surrealist imagery and perhaps the best sound engineering out of any film i've ever seen are both integral. The acting is moving with the hithereto unknown Aleksey Kravchenko exacting a mindblowingly horrific performance as the young boy Florya - who's expressions capture the sheer terror experienced by millions all over the Eastern Front. Technically brilliant, excellently scored and shot, emotional, horrific, brutal, surreal and vivid, this strange masterwork of a war film picks up and improves exponentially on works such as Apocalypse Now & Catch-22. Brilliant.