Death comes to the characters of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s films in sickening ways: under torture by an enemy army, gunned down and buried alive in a self-dug grave, even self-destruction by jumping into a cauldron of molten metal. The Ukrainian filmmaker’s need to express the horrors of his country’s war with Russia, which entered its eighth year in 2021, emerges as a scream of unbearable pain in his third feature, Reflection (Vidblysk). It is an emotional extension of his 2019 Venice Horizons winner Atlantis, which was set in the near future where courageous men and women participate in the exhumation of war dead from unmarked mass graves, but here the action is more internal and the overall feeling more dispersive.
Reflection is set in November 2014, the first year of the war, and it describes the nightmarish experience of Serhiy (Roman Lutskiy), an overworked hospital surgeon of 40, who finds himself lost in enemy territory and then captured. His later processing of this horror, which also affects his teenage daughter Polina and her mother, makes up the second part of the film.
As in Atlantis, the structure is unconventional and revelatory, even if the ambiguity of some scenes makes interpretation not always clear. For instance, the film is bracketed by two bizarre therapy sessions, if that’s what they are. In the opening scene, Polina (Nika Myslytska) pulls on a white zip-up suit and reenacts a theatrical gun battle with her classmates. Meanwhile, her biological father Serhiy tersely exchanges real war news with the girl’s stepfather Andriy (Andriy Rymaruk), who is now married to his ex-wife (Nadia Levchenko). The news is bad: the wounded are pouring into distant, under-equipped hospitals and Andriy is preparing to return to the front in Eastern Ukraine to fight the separatists, heavily armed by Russia.
Vasyanovych, who doubles as cinematographer and editor, makes the radical choice to shoot nearly every scene as a fixed frame tableau. The camera never moves and for several minutes the viewer is left looking around the shot and picking up what meanings are there to gleam. Though this strategy does give the film a strong stylistic framework, it can become enervating even to seasoned audiences (like those at its bow in Venice competition). A little more variety would have been welcome.
Several of these tableaux are so cruel and barbarous they are almost impossible to watch. Early on we see Serhiy at work in a small operating theater where he is trying earnestly to save a dying, blood-soaked patient, the victim of a mining explosion. But the man dies, and while the nurses wheel his body away, Serhiy tries to catch his breath to face a convoy of badly wounded soldiers who need medical attention.
“Why don’t you go to the front like Andriy?” asks his daughter. The next shot shows him in uniform bouncing around in the back of a truck, trying to navigate a snowbound country road for the driver in the dark. This traveling shot is harrowing, and the tension skyrockets as a checkpoint comes into view.
Serhiy’s imprisonment begins with a bit of electrical torture, then the commanding officer demands he be present at two full-blown torture sessions and pronounce the victims alive or dead. If they are alive, they will continue to be tortured.
One of the prisoners is a man Serhiy knows very well.
Vasyanovych doesn’t seem particularly interested in depicting courage, heroism or moral choices in this extreme human situation. There really aren’t many choices to be made, and in this sense one can link the film to a long tradition of movies documenting the horrors of the Soviet gulags and camps (Vitali Kanevsky’s Freeze, Die, Come to Life springs to mind). The only objective is survival, and in the situation depicted, it seems a miracle that Serhiy survives his ordeal and returns to his comfortable apartment in the city. But this is not the end of the film; it is just the beginning of his attempt to make sense of a universe that may or may not include God.
The final scenes (again, mostly shot in deep focus in one take by a fixed camera) are not so gut-wrenching as the earlier shockers and not so easy to interpret, making for a weakened third act. Apparently innocuous events happen in places of death, burial and cremation. Bones are x-rayed; bodies are exhumed; a bird crashes into the picture window of Serhiy’s living room because it sees a reflection of the sky in it. Perhaps these symbolic events are all different ways the protags work through the psychological trauma of the war and seek closure, one of the themes of Atlantis.
Vasyanovych’s eye-catching lighting picks up the different moods of Vladlen Odudenko’s essential yet sophisticated set design, smothering his living room in blue hues when he’s relaxing with his record collection and revealing its various colors when he’s tensely eating take-out with Polina. But the sets viewers will remember most clearly are surely the ugly slab of concrete where the Russian military torture their prisoners, and a truck disguised as Humanitarian Aid that actually houses a mobile crematorium for the victims.
Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Valentyn Vasyanovych
Cast: Roman Lutskiy, Nika Myslytska, Nadia Levchenko, Andriy Rymaruk, Ihor Shulha
Producers: Iya Myslytska, Valentyn Vasyanovych, Vladimir Yatsenko, Anna Sobolevska
Production design: Vladlen Odudenko
Costume design: Olena Harmanenko
Sound: Serhiy Stepanskiy
Production companies: Arsenal Films (Ukraine), Fore Films (Ukraine)
World sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition)
In Ukrainian, Russian
125 minutes
