Come and See

Come and See (Иди и смотри, 1985) is Elem Klimov's war drama, free to watch online on iFILM. In German-occupied Belarus, a teenage boy named Florya digs a rifle out of the dirt, joins the partisans, and comes home a stranger to himself.

Florya gets separated from the fighters, crosses the marshes with a girl named Glasha, and reaches his village to find it emptied of everyone he loved. What follows is an SS reprisal raid filmed without a single cut away from the horror. Aleksei Kravchenko was fourteen during the shoot, and the camera tracks his face as the light leaves it; by the end his hair has gone gray and his eyes look forty years older.

Klimov adapted the story with Ales Adamovich, who fought as a partisan boy himself, and built the soundtrack around the muffled ringing of a shell-shocked ear so you hear the war the way Florya does. This isn't a movie about heroism. It's about how war burns the childhood out of a person, frame by frame. Brutal, exhausting, and arguably the most honest anti-war film Soviet cinema ever made. Stream Come and See (1985) online on iFILM.