The face of horror

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2009)

This has become one of my favorite war movies. The face of the protagonist still echos in my head as he watches a church full of people burn to the ground; or as he realizes that his family has been murdered; or in the most intense and abstract of scenes, when he gazes down upon the picture of Hitler and fires his gun for the first time as a mélange of war footage is interwoven with his disturbed expression. Many times throughout the film Klimov's use of sound creates an intense overwhelming feeling which almost literally makes me feel the anxiety that the characters must be experiencing in the scene. A good example is when the protagonist realizes his family is dead and unites with the surviving villagers. There is an effective use of disorienting sounds that really do start to make you feel like the world is collapsing around you. What sticks with you the most after seeing this movie is probably its depiction of the reality of war. In so many ways this movie puts Saving Private Ryan to shame (still an awesome movie) where we get a bunch of high paid heads to make us "feel" for them through acting. Rather, in "Come and See" we get the opposite, very few, low paid actors. The "feel" then comes from the directing style and the directors voice.