Elem Klimov’s war film makes a boy’s terror almost unbearable through Aleksei Kravchenko’s performance and its punishing sound. We strongly recommend it, despite moments when Klimov presses for an effect the actor has already achieved.
Come and See is a war film we would urge people to see, and hesitate to put on without warning. Elem Klimov follows a boy into the partisans in occupied Soviet Belorussia in 1943, keeping the experience close enough to make the usual comforts of the genre feel indecent. There is no safe distance from the suffering here. At 142 minutes, it is a severe demand on our attention, sometimes too insistent in its effects, but the demand is justified.
Klimov and co-writer Ales Adamovich put an adolescent at the centre of the story, a choice that could easily have produced a familiar lesson in lost innocence. Kravchenko makes that phrase feel inadequate. His face registers fear with an openness that is difficult to watch; we can read the shock without being allowed to think we have understood its extent. The close-ups keep asking us to look at someone whose ability to make sense of what he sees is being overwhelmed.
Alexey Rodionov’s cinematography is crucial to that pressure: the close-ups leave little opportunity to look away from the boy and examine his surroundings. Elsewhere, the images become strange enough to suggest that Flyora can no longer rely on what he sees. Viktor Petrov’s production design keeps the countryside recognisable as a place where people live and work. That everyday setting makes the increasingly strange images harder to dismiss as a bad dream.
We were horrified by the bombing raid, particularly the shrill noise that takes over the soundtrack when Flyora’s hearing is damaged. It makes an injury something we have to listen through, without the reassuring separation that a well-staged explosion can provide. Oleg Yanchenko’s music contributes to the disorientation, though it is the damaged hearing that makes the deepest impression. The raid is enough to explain why this belongs as much to horror as to the war film.
Valeriya Belova’s editing makes the shifts between recognisable wartime experience and disorientation difficult to settle into. We are not given the rhythm of a conventional action sequence, with each danger neatly placed and then dealt with. That is effective, but it also makes the running time feel punishing. The quieter, more lyrical passages matter because without those changes of pace the film’s ferocity would become easier to shut out.
Our reservation is with Klimov’s occasional need to press harder when the performance has already done enough. The insistence can make Flyora seem temporarily reduced to a face on which the director can register another degree of horror. We wanted Klimov to trust Kravchenko enough to ease off. That objection matters in a film so committed to making us attend to a person, though Kravchenko repeatedly gives us someone more particular than a representative victim.
Many war films allow us to take satisfaction in courage, endurance or the successful completion of a task. Come and See makes that satisfaction hard to find, and we think it is right to do so. Its attention stays with what violence does to the person who has to witness it. See it when you are prepared to give it your full attention, and leave yourself some quiet afterwards.
