Come and See | WAR FILM | FULL MOVIE

While I appreciate that so many people enjoy this as a film, it really is more than that. It’s more than a cinephile talking point. It’s more than “the best horror movie ever” or “the most disturbing depressing movie ever”. This film was a statement. A reminder of real history. This was Klimov’s way of de-romanticizing / caricaturing Nazis, as the tradition had been in Hollywood. 27 million people died in the USSR during the war, compared to 400,000 US soldiers in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters combined. The sheer terror of Nazi occupation in the East is something no one in the west can really understand. The stats are clear on the treatment of prisoners and citizens between the two halves of Nazi occupied Europe - the Nazis sought to eradicate the Slavic peoples - Vernichtungskreig, a war of annihilation. The Dirlewanger Brigade was just one group that unleashed this kind of obscene genocide on the people in the East. 1943, the Great Patriotic War, territory of Belarus. The 16-year-old boy Flera, having dug out a carbine among scraps of barbed wire, rusty machine-gun belts and shot-through helmets, goes into the forest to join the ranks of the partisans. This film, like no other, shows the tragedy of a child on a battlefield. At the beginning of the picture Flera is just a teenager. But In the end, having gone through horror and fear, child becomes an adult, frighteningly adult - his face is distorted by senile wrinkles, and there is no room for love in his soul...