The war movie Alex Garland calls “increasingly disturbing”
Since moving into directing, Alex Garland has been no stranger to the more disturbing side of cinematic storytelling, crafting a string of intensely atmospheric and often uneasy films that occupy multiple genres simultaneously.
With that in mind, when the filmmaker behind the thought-provoking sci-fi Ex Machina, psychological fantasy horror Annihilation, and borderline indescribable nightmare Men calls a movie “increasingly disturbing”, it’s something well worth taking on board.
Named as one of the greatest films ever made by many of the industry’s most notable directors in a Sight & Sound poll, co-writer and director Elem Klimov’s anti-war epic Come and See has long been lauded as one of the defining Soviet-era features. Tracing Aleksey Kravchenko’s Florya through the perils of war as he joins the local resistance, meets a girl, discovers his family brutally murdered, and braves the horrors of war, it’s far from an easy watch.
Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes, Garland expanded on the visceral impact of the World War II-set story. He said: “It plays a really complicated game between the absolute sharp edge of reality and the strangeness of interior surrealism and brings the two together, I think, perfectly, to make the film extraordinarily powerful.”
Noting that “it’s not an easy watch”, he warns anyone who might be willing to take his recommendation on board that “you have to be up for it, and you have to be prepared for it.”
Branding it as “increasingly disturbing as a piece of filmmaking” might not come across as obvious heavy-handed praise, but Garland notes that it’s all about the way in which Come and See is “brilliantly executed”.
“At the end, it takes such a big swing, such a big imaginative, creative stylistic swing, and lands it,” he said. “I think it’s a truly great piece of cinema.”
Warning any prospective viewers that it demands complete, undivided, and unequivocal attention, the 28 Days Later scribe adds that it needs to be devoured in one sitting to extract the best experience: “It’s definitely a film where it would be a mistake to have your phones in such a way where you’ll get alerted by a text message or you’ll need to go and fix a sandwich halfway through,” he continued. “Because it’s meditative until it becomes incredibly visceral. I would recommend it, strongly.”
Even though it’s been branded as “disturbing” by somebody who holds it in high regard, Come and See‘s status as one of the most important motion pictures of its era tells a story in and of itself. It even took so much out of its director that he never made another movie again, with Klimov telling The New York Times that he “lost interest in making films” because “everything that was possible, I felt I had already done”.
See the trailer below.
