COME AND SEE (1985)

Few films have depicted war without glorifying the violence the filmmakers purport to condemn. Even fewer movies have accurately captured the true horrors of mass conflict with resolute sincerity: the utter destruction of land, the systematic demolition of hospitals, housing, and natural resources, and the routine practice of rape, torture, and massacre. In this respect, Come and See is practically unique.

Elem Klimov’s film doesn’t just depict a series of war atrocities that occurred in Belarus in 1943. It isn’t merely a portrayal of one boy’s fight for survival against insuperable forces. Instead, Come and See is a vivid tapestry of intense suffering, both physical and existential. It’s a meditative exploration of the evil that dwells inside the human heart, a nauseating dive into the depths of our animalistic depravity, and a glimpse at the terrors that can be found within mankind’s soul, should you be brave enough—or unfortunate enough—to look inside.

Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko) is a 14-year-old Belarusian boy who’s conscripted to fight against the surging German army. Leaving behind his mother and two sisters at home, Flyora is ecstatic to serve, keen to defeat his homeland’s invaders. However, he discovers very quickly that there is nothing sweet nor noble about war. Instead, Flyora soon realises that there are more fates worse than death than he could possibly ever have imagined.

Come and See is probably the most haunting war film ever made. Much like Schindler’s List (1993), it’s a film that achieves profound beauty amidst such overwhelming, omnipresent darkness, one that’s so exquisitely filmed, yet so difficult to watch. In what’s arguably the most disturbing film in cinema history, Klimov conveys the potential for evil that exists in all human beings—including those in the audience, watching in mute terror decades later.

As such, Klimov’s masterpiece is an immersive spectacle and an incomparable film experience. When I first watched Come and See in the cinema, in moments of silence, you could have heard a pin drop in the packed theatre; I can’t think of another film that’s had such a palpable effect on an audience. Particularly today, when there’s always someone talking, eating noisily, or checking their phone, encountering such an astonished hush in the cinema was a rarity that stayed with me: if nothing else, it spoke of the sheer visceral power on-screen. As Flyora encounters trauma after trauma, it’s transmitted to the audience with stunning, discomfiting ease.

Because it does feel as though Klimov is violating the viewer. In documenting one boy’s wartime experiences with such unfaltering honesty, with such a steadfast refusal to look away and spare us, he relays the anguish to his audience—yet we know it’s only a fraction of what Flyora must feel. While other filmmakers have succeeded in assaulting their spectators with a raw, graphic intensity—the likes of Gaspar Noé with Irreversible (2002) or Lars von Trier with Antichrist (2009) spring, reluctantly, to mind—the power of Klimov’s depiction is something that few works can rival.

This is partly because no violence is glorified in Come and See. In the opening sequence, as Flyora triumphantly unearths a rifle that’s been buried, sheer bliss is etched on his young face, beaming at his newfound potential for violence. Anyone who’s read a poem by Wilfred Owen will know what happens next: innocence will be quickly snuffed out, stamped underfoot by the enemy’s boot. The youth’s romantic understanding of the world will meet a grisly and abrupt end in what’s among the most tragic coming-of-age tales ever made.

This happens in stages for young Flyora. First, he encounters the tedium of war: he’s not invited to advance with his militia, but is instead instructed to stay behind and watch over camp. That is, right after he’s ordered to swap his boots with an old man, whose shoes are falling apart at the seams. Here he meets Glasha (Olga Mironova), a young woman who’s in love with Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevičius), the leading commander. The two barely get to know each other before pandemonium ensues: German dive bombers destroy the forest, uprooting trees, obliterating the resistance base camp, and deafening Flyora.

Scenes that follow bear an eerie resemblance to a fever dream: rain falls from canopy branches as Flyora shakes the bole of a tree, a wide, childlike grin on his face. It seems as though the shock has driven him completely mad. Glasha, too, appears to have entered into a manic psychosis, and we’re not sure if the world we see around them is real or of their own distorted perception.

Part of the enduring power behind Come and See is found in the power of the film’s imagery: a stork treads silently through the forest, soaked by the rain, and stumbles upon a small shelter, the fragile refuge for a boy and girl who are suddenly alone in the world. Then there are those portraits that embed themselves into your mind as soon as you witness them: slaughtered villagers, piled up and left to fester against the back of a barn. A man who’s been covered in kerosene and set alight, without even being given the mercy of a bullet. The infamous image of Flyora having a gun pressed against his temple, unsure if the trigger will be pulled at any moment.

Indeed, it’s these images that stay with you most, as the film’s themes of brutality and human savagery find their greatest resonance in the painterly cinematography of Aleksei Rodionov. Long, sweeping tracking shots ensure that nothing of the destruction is missed, while also succeeding at making audiences feel as though they’re present to witness sequences of unparalleled cruelty first-hand. You cover your mouth in mute shock as a toddler is thrown back into a barn to be burned alive. You’re left speechless when you watch a young woman walk down a road, black bruises surrounding her wide eyes, with blood dripping down her thighs. In her catatonia, she’s still blowing a whistle to signal for help, even though there was no one there to answer it when she needed it most.

It’s images like these that remain with you long after the credits have rolled. They make an indelible imprint on your mind that’s incapable of being expunged. What’s more, the atmosphere of rapturous sadism that characterises the invading German soldiers is the stuff of nightmares, lending the entire film an aura akin to being trapped in Dante’sseventh circle of Hell. As murderers cavort around a burning village, wheeling corpses about, or gang-raping a peasant, these men seem barely human—they’re something closer to demons, evil spirits that have slithered from the cracks of the earth and taken mortal form.

It’s not Arendt’s banality of evil on display—it’s pure, mindless depravity. Soldiers, drunk on power and port, gambol and frolic about with unfettered carnal impulse and murderous ecstasy. When some soldiers are caught by the resistance, we’re given insight into what could lead someone to behave so inhumanely: hate, bigotry, and opportunity. One Nazi soldier spews Aryan vitriol without shame to his Belarusian captors, and it’s the same toxic rhetoric that’s fomented an entire nation to armed conflict: “Your nation does not deserve to exist. Some nations have no right to a future.”

I’ve heard people argue that Come and See unfairly demonises German soldiery (and as a result, German people) as unfeeling psychopaths, who can only derive pleasure from genocidal mayhem. There’s an argument to be made that it’s exceptionally one-sided in its depiction, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that this film still works as a potent propaganda piece in Eastern Europe. However, I don’t consider Klimov’s directorial hand to be biased: such crimes against humanity did take place, and they occurred for the same reasons that Klimov asserts.

Moreover, I don’t consider the depiction of spiritual corruption in Come and See to be an indictment of Germany per se, so much as a merciless, unwaveringly bleak analysis of the human capacity for evil. Part of what makes this film such a disturbing viewing is that it reveals, without hyperbole, what we all would be capable of under the most extreme of conditions. Imperialist regimes the world over have committed acts so monstrous and so unnecessarily vicious that it’s sickening even to think about them. The British concentration camps in the Second Boer War, the Japanese Rape of Nanjing, or the My Lai Massacre at the hands of American soldiers. And there’s nothing to suggest such evil is in our distant past: the ongoing war crime committed against the Palestinian people by the Israeli government, which Amnesty International and a United Nations Special Committee have formally recognised as genocide, is the televised proof that such crimes against humanity are still being perpetrated by ostensibly civilised society.

History reveals that there is rarely a good side in war. Perhaps that’s why there’s no solace to be found in the dramatic conclusion. There isn’t even a sense of catharsis at watching savage men being savaged themselves. Instead, one can only feel misery at watching the cycle of violence continue, particularly as you find within yourself a desire for it to happen: I want to watch such evil be vanquished. I want those who inflict suffering on others to suffer just as greatly.

And I feel mildly disgusted, because I know that this is impossible, that those who torture and harm so gleefully can never have the same level of suffering inflicted onto them, and my desire for this to be achieved is the same cycle of violence happening within me; I don’t necessarily want justice so much as vengeance, and no matter how closely related the two may be in result, they are discernibly distinct in feeling.

Amid such abject horror, we’re left with the enigmatic title: Come and See. It sounds like an ominous invitation, but what it promises to reveal remains obscure. I had always considered the title to be some kind of sinister offer, something between a genuine proposal to illuminate the uninitiated, and a baleful threat: “You want to know what war is all about? Well then… come and see. Come and see what evil exists on Earth.”

I now know that Klimov took the title from the Book of Revelation: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

Flyora has seen it now. He’s seen what war is: a place where men go to abandon their humanity. And if by some tragic miracle they keep it, they’ll suffer all the greater for it. Because that is precisely what we witness in Come and See: Hell on Earth. An omnipresent evil that’s so potent not even divine forces can stop it. It’s for this reason that a young boy would try to drown himself in a marsh: realising such evil could exist in the world can only result in a desire to escape it.

Part of what makes this film such a genuinely demoralising viewing is that, as we watch villagers burnt to death, starved to emaciation, or raped repeatedly, we’re keenly aware that none of what we’re witnessing is exaggerated. And it’s with this knowledge that we come to see that it’s we who are the beasts of the Earth, and if God was ever around to witness it, he left a long time ago.

SOVIET UNION | 1985 | 142 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | BELARUSIAN • GERMAN • RUSSIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Elem Klimov.
writers: Ales Adamovich & Elem Klimov (based on the novel ‘I Am From the Fiery Village’ by Ales Adamovich).
starring: Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevičius, Vladas Bagdonas & Tatyana Shestakova.