Now we head to Russia for COME AND SEE. This
WW2 film from 1985 is a coming-of-age tragedy that most would probably not call
a traditional horror film. But, it's full of horror.
Aleksey Kravchenko stars as a young boy from a
small village who wants to join the Russian partisans and fight back against
the Nazis. He digs up a gun, lost from some other fallen soldier, and leaves
his protesting mother behind to join a band of warriors hiding out in the
woods.
It isn't long before the Partisans decide to
leave him behind as they move forward. The boy is left with a young girl (Olga
Mironova) who has been through a lot – first as a prisoner of the Nazis and now
as refugee with the Partisans.
The two travel the war-torn Russian landscape
in an attempt to survive. The young boy is deafened by an explosion, they find
his family home abandoned (and bodies of the entire village piled up outside of
it) and he ends up in the thick of a Nazi attack on another nearby village, in
which all of the villagers are herded into a barn and then burnt alive.
COME AND SEE is unforgiving in its portrayal
of the inhumanity and destruction of war, more so than any other fictionalized
film I've ever seen. It was co-written by the director, Elem Klimov, and a
real-life survivor of these atrocities, Ales Adamovich.
The film all but wallows in despair, but does
not exist in a totally, gritty, realistic world, either. It still has artistic
and cinematic strokes, including cinematography by Aleksei Rodionov that makes
it seem like the camera is floating effortlessly above and through the carnage
like we might float through a nightmare.
There is no happy ending here, but there is an
interesting climax where the boy fires his gun at a portrait of Hitler he finds
in a puddle. What follows is a very powerful fantasy montage that must be seen
to be believed, ending on a note that is fittingly as heart breaking as the
rest of the film.
I can see why Time Out would consider this one
of the best horror films ever made, but it’s also probably one of the best
films ever made, period.
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