Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Black marketeers Marko and Blacky manufacture and sell weapons to the Communist resistance in WWII Belgrade, living the good life along the way. Marko's surreal duplicity propels him up the ranks of the Communist Party, and he eventually abandons Blacky and steals his girlfriend. After a lengthy stay in a below-ground shelter, the couple reemerges during the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s as Marko sees the opportunity to exploit the situation.
Kusturica's Underground is a delirious, carnivalesque epic spanning five decades of Yugoslav history. The plot is audaciously constructed — a grand allegorical black comedy that uses its surreal premise to dissect political betrayal, myth-making, and national identity with savage wit. The acting, led by Miki Manojlović and Lazar Ristovski, is ferociously committed and physically explosive. Cinematography by Vilko Filač is extraordinary — saturated, kinetic, and intoxicatingly alive, matching the anarchic energy of the brass-band score. Novelty is off the charts: no other film quite sounds, looks, or feels like this — a one-of-a-kind tragicomic vision of history as collective delusion. The ending is visually striking and thematically resonant but risks feeling schematic and overly on-the-nose as allegory, preventing it from achieving the full emotional devastation the film builds toward — the weakest link in an otherwise towering work.