The movie starts out with a older man speaking, but what is really strange is a young boy speaking in a voice that wouldn’t be out of place in Norwegian Black Metal.
When I saw this, I realized that I had tried to watch this movie a few years ago, but found that little kid’s voice so incongruous and outright weird that I gave up at that point.
Continuing, his older friend digs up a German rifle. While standing there with it, a Fw 189 recon airplane flies overhead implying he’s been spotted.
Some point after this a Wehrmacht Feldgendarmerie soldier — gorget and all — with what I guessed was a Belarussian collaborator show up at his home demanding to know where the rifle is. Because the German Fw 189 crew saw him, right?
They take him away to … a partisan camp. Wait, what?
The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes
This film is new to me. Just watched it on YouTube. It is an art film, slow and very bleak. It is all about emotions experienced by human beings in the grasp of unrelenting terror, not realism. The director constantly offers close ups of the actors and actresses, attempting to show you what they are feeling as the events of the film unfold. The terror starts small and ratchets up as the film progresses but graphic depictions of horror are very restrained by modern standards.
The characters at the beginning of the film are all partisans. They use German equipment scavenged from old battlefields. The mother does not want her son to join the partisans because the Germans brutally punish partisan villages.
Comparing Come and See to The Wall has merit. Both films showcase humanity at its very worst. The end of both films have a similar message.
