Come and See

Come and See is a stark depiction of Nazi occupation founded from the most intimate perspective of a young boy who attempts to join the partisan fighters in Belarus. The plotting itself seems simple enough but is the approach of director Elem Klimov that makes this film a truly harrowing experience. The film features that perspective closely where the horrors are often just in the peripheral view of the frame, which seems to make them even more disturbing than if they where bluntly placed at the center of the screen. The film attempts to inflict the viewer with the same experience through this constrictor that is very effective in this approach. We are not granted a broader viewer, even a broader hope, we only know what our young boy sees which one horrific sight after another. Now this itself could be numbing if not for the film's particular approach that leaves every instance an impression on your memory. As it creates the sense of the confusion of the life in the occupation, those attempts to fight back, but mostly being lost with the only checkpoints being those moments of the very worst of humanity. The film startling in the ease of the events in a way particularly a village massacre that the perpetrators almost treat like a picnic. What is as disturbing though is the depiction of how this weighs on the people and particularly this boy who seems to age into a hardened older man by the film's haunting last sequence where the boy blindly rages at a photograph of Hitler. Where Downfall portrayed the rot on the man around him, Come and See is a startling depiction of the rot and victims of the man's hate filled agenda.
5/5