Critics reviews

Whatever the verdict, Come and See is among the most vividly realized war films ever made; a work of truly lacerating power and endlessly beguiling strangeness.

No one who has watched Come and See, Elem Klimov’s legendary 1985 anti-war film, can forget the horrors at its climax.

This film ranks with Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain as a World War II nightmare of humanity pushed beyond its limits. It rivals Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal as an apocalyptic vision of mortal fear and mass sadism flaying every vestige of faith, hope, and charity in a scarred quarter of the world.

Though it’s not likely to diminish, it’s nevertheless imperative that this early exhibition of juvenile conduct remains fixed in the mind for the duration of Come and See, for all that transpires in the principally adult realm of ruination to come, most of it afflicting Florya in an almost incomprehensible fashion, is at its most forcefully concentrated when witnessed through the vantage of a child’s perspective.

There have been many Russian movies on the subject of World War II but none more ferocious than Elem Klimov’s “Come and See.” Seldom if ever have wartime atrocities been depicted so vividly — and with such hallucinated fervor.

A film of shifting perspectives, it primarily owes its power to Flyora's dominant viewpoint, which cements the audience's identification with him... What separates Klimov's film from other child's-eye views of war—including Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, to which it is a partial response—is its transcending of the confining properties of its frame.

This intense sequence . . . encapsulates many of the strongest qualities of Elem Klimov's film, in particular its ability to shift tone, visual perspective and viscerally approximate the physical, mental, social and cultural conditions of life in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia in 1943. The young woman's look back at this image of horror, almost Biblical or medieval in its intensity and scale, rhymes with many other looks, gazes and shifts of scale and perspective which dot and define the film.