Quartile rating: 8.5/10 · 1 rating
The invasion of a village in Belarus by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.
Come and See is one of cinema's most harrowing and singular achievements. Its plot is deliberately episodic and hallucinatory rather than conventionally structured, creating an immersive descent into trauma that feels unlike any other war film. The acting — particularly Aleksei Kravchenko's physical and psychological transformation — is extraordinary and largely unrepeatable. Klimov's cinematography is stunning and visceral, using wide-angle lenses and long takes to place the viewer inside the horror rather than at a safe distance. Its novelty is nearly unmatched: no war film before or since quite replicates its sensory assault, surrealist touches, and commitment to the perspective of a boy aging before our eyes. The ending, while philosophically rich — the time-reversing montage climaxing with the infant Hitler — is slightly more conventionally didactic compared to the overwhelming experiential rawness of what precedes it, making it the one category that, while still strong, falls just short of the film's extraordinary overall standard.