Film Review: Come and See

Come and See is not merely a war film; it is an ordeal. Elem Klimov’s 1985 work confronts the viewer with an unrelenting vision of violence that is not shaped by spectacle, heroism, or narrative catharsis, but by historical and psychological truth. It is jarring, emotionally exhausting, and devastatingly comprehensive in its portrayal of a lesser-known chapter of World War II: the systematic annihilation of Belarusian villages during the Nazi campaign against suspected partisans.

What distinguishes Come and See from nearly every other major war film is its refusal to aestheticize conflict. While films such as Saving Private Ryan rely on kinetic action, Greyhound on tactical tension, and The Pianist on resilience and survival, Klimov strips war of all cinematic ornamentation or flourish. There is no triumphant momentum, no romanticized suffering, and no moral comfort. The camera does not guide the viewer toward admiration or identification; it forces endurance. The result is a film that feels almost documentary in its bluntness, yet hallucinatory in its intensity.

In this sense, Come and See functions as a cinematic meditation on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. The atrocities depicted are not committed by monstrous figures set apart from humanity, but by ordinary men performing systematic acts of destruction as a matter of procedure. Villages are erased with chilling efficiency. Families are annihilated without ceremony. Over 600 Belarusian villages were destroyed in this manner, many with no survivors, and the film’s most horrifying achievement is how routine such devastation is allowed to appear. Evil is not dramatized; it is normalized.

The story unfolds through the perspective of Flyora, a young boy who joins the partisan resistance with naïve enthusiasm. What follows is not a coming-of-age story, but a coming-apart. His psychological disintegration becomes the film’s central narrative arc. Klimov uses Flyora not as a heroic figure, but as a vessel for the audience’s own moral and emotional collapse. Aleksei Kravchenko’s performance is extraordinary: his face ages before our eyes, hollowed by terror and incomprehension. The trauma he embodies feels less acted than endured.

As Flyora moves through the countryside, he encounters death not as isolated tragedy, but as constant presence. He witnesses the destruction of villages, the suffering of civilians, and the concomitant erosion of moral order. His responses oscillate between hysteria, paralysis, and numbness. In one of the film’s most haunting moments, he collapses behind a cow, exhausted beyond fear, beyond grief, beyond comprehension. It is a physical manifestation of psychological saturation: a body that can no longer contain what it has seen.

What Come and See captures with brutal clarity is not a single traumatic event, but the accumulation of trauma. War here is not one catastrophe but an unbroken sequence of emotional overloads. Each horror compounds the last until meaning itself begins to dissolve. Flyora does not adapt; he deteriorates. gThis stands in stark contrast to many war films that suggest resilience or moral growth. Klimov suggests something far more disturbing: that there are experiences from which no growth is possible, only damage.

When German soldiers are finally cornered after burning one village, the film reaches a philosophical climax. Their justifications vary, obedience to orders, ideological loyalty, historical inevitability, but none offer redemption. These rationalizations do not mitigate the horror; they deepen it. They expose how violence becomes bureaucratized, how responsibility is dispersed until it vanishes, and how moral accountability dissolves into language. The scene does not resolve the film’s tension; it indicts the very systems that allow such violence to persist.

Part of what makes Come and See stand apart from and incommensurable with so many other films in the war genre because it refuses to console. There is no narrative reward for enduring its brutality, no aesthetic relief from its suffering. Its power lies in its verisimilitude, its emotional rigor, and its unflinching commitment to historical truth. It does not seek to honor war, nor even to explain it. It seeks to document it in a way that evinces full authenticity however unbearable. The ending, much like that of the anti-war sentiment portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front, leaves Flyora in a similar position: right back where he started.

In doing so, Klimov created one of the most honest films ever made about violence. Come and See does not ask us to understand war. It asks us to survive witnessing it, and to carry that weight forward, unresolved.