Klondike

Saw this back at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival

When I first heard about this at Sundance, I didn't know what to think about it as I have never seen a movie from Ukraine before and this was a weird synopsis. However, after viewing it, it's very clear that Maryna Er Gorbach has a great future of making possible masterpieces of Ukraine cinema. Gorbach offers such an brutal look of the political situation between Ukraine and Russia through the lens of a couple struggling to go on with their days. Throughout the movie, there are many incredible long but realistic takes of characters walking around and speaking which really helped to add the realism and brutal nature of what the characters were facing. All performances were amazing and the characters felt so real as if you are really witnessing them going through this troubles.

The execution is perfectly made as it shows that Gorbach really cares about her craft. Beautiful sound designs and there were some moments that made me feel really uneasy but in a good way. The feeling of uneasy because it was quite brutal and hard to stomach at times. Pacing did drag a little but it wasn't something that ruined my entire experience with this movie.

Rating: A-

It kept me in suspense while watching the movie.

A story familiar to Ukrainians before the full-scale invasion, and familiar - after.

You watch a movie, and you realize that Ukrainians are different, even though they were born on the same land. And you often ask yourself the question: why are we so different?

Personalities are always interesting to watch. How they show their character in different situations. Why do feelings control them?

You want to watch the emotional life of the characters. You want to worry for them, to believe. Ukrainians are not immigrants, we are in our own territory. This is our land!

You know what's going to happen here yet you watch it for the strong character that leads Klondike with her family who are suddenly finding it difficult to exist. There's levity in the proceedings that make you really wonder what is all this for. With excellent performances and haunting visuals, Klondike kept me hooked and made me morose at the same time. The visuals are so stunning you almost believe you are at the Ukraine-Russia border. The worse part is that you dear for your life too. Interestingly, at the IFFK this year all I have seen so far are tragedies.

(Watched at the 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala in Trivandrum.)

Klondike captures something that's often missing in films about war, and that is the cruel, unforgiving randomness of it.

In many war movies, there will be build-up to the carnage; lingering shots of dead bodies that add gravity to them. When we open on an unassuming couple in their homestead, there's nothing to prepare us for the blast that sets the film in motion. (As for the deaths, the most striking thing about them is usually how LITTLE gravity they have; how profoundly indifferent the world seems toward them.)

What follows is a movie that's both brutal enough to rival Klimov's Come and See (mainly towards the end) and well-shot and well-staged enough to rival Tarkovsky -- with its misty greens and long, solemn takes of rural, once-Soviet environments. The way the camera slowly but surely creeps forward during some of these lengthy takes (in a way where we initially don't realize there's any movement) also reminded me of 2014's Norte: The End of History.

It is a film that I've anticipated since its Sundance premiere all the way back in January 2022; only now does it get a wide release. Some people assume that it was based on recent events, namely the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that alerted more people to the Russo-Ukranian War than ever, not knowing that the film predates the escalation and that this conflict dates all the way back to 2014 (the events of the film revolve around the attack against Malaysia Airlines flight 17). So, no, this is not the "movie version" of all that stuff you've seen on TikTok.

For the most part, little seems to happen in the movie, yet there is always something to spot in the backgrounds, even in the farthest distance, be it passing war vehicles or groups of Ukrainian civilians wandering mournfully -- the ongoing bedlam is always, on some level, felt. Regardless, the actors we follow are superb, and the music by Zviad Mgebrishvili makes for an effective dirge.

In a perfect world, the "Best International Feature" slot for All Quiet On the Western Front, as good as that movie was, would have instead gone to Klondike.

New generation of people, born and raised during the occupation is one of the greatest tragedies that modern Ukraine has faced and going to face in the future.

This movie is telling the story of the origin of this trauma, without answering the question of how to cure it, and doing it in quite a brutal way.

The cinematography is beautiful. It consists of mostly static frames of soulless people and machines, whom are really busy with butchering both nature and themselves, without questioning the moral of their deeds even once, and a single human soul, terribly afraid of unknown and a savage new reality. She hides the disbelief in silence while waiting the moment of birth.

In general, it's a worthy contender for being the one of the best war movie of the modern Ukrainian cinema, it is getting really close to Atlantis, which I consider the pinnacle of this genre.