A Come and See Analysis Because Everyone Else is Stupid

"I will testify; everything that is told in this film is true"

The 1985 Soviet film entitled “Come and See,” is, objectively, the greatest work of fiction I had laid eyes onto. It is an incredible, incredible film, a genuine genius work of art that left me transcended after my first viewing. This doesn’t seem to be an unusual reaction to this film either, as it has become one of the most highly praised films of the 20th century, ranking #2 overall on the film website Letterboxd as well as garnering a reputation as one of the most gruesome and devastating films of all time. With that reputation, films like this often end up getting many misconceptions cast upon it. Similar to the fellow World War Two film Grave of the Fireflies that came out only three years after Come and See, many look upon these films as being grim, depressing portrayals of ultimate human suffering, gleaming nothing more out of it than just being a living nightmare that no one wants to watch again after putting it down. But the truth is, there’s a lot more to gleam from Come and See. Beneath its grimsly exterior lies a film that touches at the deepest roots of humanity, and the artistic way it achieves this is nothing short of miraculous. 

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, “Come and see!” And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”

-Revelation, chapter 6, verses 7-8

Let’s first look at the plot of Come and See chronologically, since many people probably haven’t heard of this relatively niche arthouse film. Set during the 1943 German invasion of Belarus, the film depicts the Khatyn massacre through the eyes of the young protagonist Flyora, who joins the Belarussian resistance army in their fight against the Nazis. However, as the resistance fighters are leaving the camp, ready to leave Flyora behind as they go off to fight in war, the invading Germans bomb their outpost, rendering Flyora partially deaf and alone save for the company of a young girl, Glasha. Already, the film makes careful work of plunging the viewer into Flyora’s psyche. Throughout the duration of the film, the sound remains muted and unsteady, mirroring Flyora’s deafness. It makes you not only see his struggles, but feel them as well, a detail that becomes much more potent later on in the film. After taking shelter in the forest, Glasha and Flyora return to Flyora’s village, which they find completely deserted. Flyora assumes that his family is off hiding in a nearby bog, and runs off to find them. What follows is what I would argue to be the single greatest scene in cinematic history: Flyora and Glasha are running to the bog, and as Glasha turns around, the camera pans behind her to reveal the bodies of the entire village, riddled with bullet holes, stacked behind a barn. It is the fate that everyone watching the film knew was waiting for them, it’s what Glasha knew and was too afraid to tell, what Flyora knew and was too afraid to admit. He tried his hardest, tricking himself to believe that they were still alive, that his village was spared from the Nazi assault, but of course, that was never going to be the case. It’s such an extraordinary work of cinematography and buildup and really helps demonstrate the inevitable destruction war brings, a motif plastered all throughout the film. This incident sends Flyora into a mental spiral. He initially tries to drown himself in the bog before Glasha and the surviving villagers drag him out. Flyora then is paraded through the crowd, which is full of horrific, grieving moans from the villagers, where he speaks to another villager, now severely burned, who had initially warned him not to go serve in war. Of course, this remark now rings ironic; going to war most likely saved Flyora from death at the Nazi’s hand, but it further reinstates the cruel reality he now finds himself in. With no family or home left to return to, he goes off and joins a small group of soldiers, and if you thought things were bad now, let me tell you, we aren’t even halfway through the film yet. While journeying to find food for the remaining villagers, Flyora’s squad is ambushed by Germans, killing two of the men and leaving only Flyora and a soldier named Rubezh, who has been looking after Flyora for much of the film. The two venture to a nearby village, where they steal a cow from a local farmer, before Rubezh and the cow are killed by German machine gun fire in a beautifully haunting scene. Now all alone, he wanders through the Belarus countryside before coming upon a farmer from the Perekhody village. While he is in the village, Nazi soldiers arrive to round up the villagers and kill them. In a desperate attempt to save them, Flyora begins screaming that the villagers are being led to their deaths, but he too is forced into the church barn where the German soldiers have wrangled all the villagers into. The Germans announce that if anyone leaves their child behind in the barn, they will be able to walk free, but the villagers resoundley reject this offer. Flyora and another woman are allowed to leave, but the woman’s child is forced back into the barn while the woman is captured and raped by German soldiers. In a cacophony of tortured screams, blaring music, and flames burning, Flyora is forced to watch as the Germans set fire to the church barn with all the villagers remaining inside. He is then left by the Germans to die. 

Flyora does not die, however. He escapes from the burning village and encounters a group of resistance fighters, having rounded up some of the main perpetrators of the attack on the Perekhody village. The soldiers demand to know who committed the assault on the village, and all the Germans deny involvement, until Flyora speaks up and tells the resistance fighters of the Germans’ horrific demands to leave the children inside the burning church. The Nazis begin to realize that there is no escape from their fate, save one, a Nazi officer who tells Flyora, “all the trouble starts with kids. Your nation doesn’t deserve to exist. Some nations have no right to a future. Inferior races spread the communist contagion. Your nation doesn’t deserve to exist. We will fulfill this objective. If not today, then tomorrow.” And as the Nazi offenders are doused in gasoline, the Soviet fighters fire upon the Germans before they are able to be lit on fire. As the resistance army begins to leave, Flyora comes face to face with a shattered framed picture of Adolf Hitler, submerged in a puddle of water. In a state of overwhelming grief and rage, Flyora fires his rifle for the first time in the film, destroying the portrait as flashes of Hitler’s life come upon the screen. Each shot fired goes further into Hitler’s past, until Flyora arrives at the beginning of Hitler’s life, in an image of baby Hitler in his mother’s arms. At this moment, Flyora pauses. He puts his gun down and begins crying, crying for all the hardships Hitler’s actions have brought upon him, his family, his village, and his country. He then rejoins the resistance army in his fight against Germany, as the film states that “628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all of their inhabitants.”

“Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war, and as a plea for peace.”

-Ales Adamovich

So that was a lot wasn’t it. But what’s up with all of this? Why would someone put to life such a harrowing work of art? Sure, being anti-war is one thing, but isn’t this a little excessive? That is, of course, the mindset of a pussy. Come and See depicts what it does out of necessity. The truth is that all the events of the film really happened. They happened to the citizens of Belarus, and in fact many instances were even worse than the events of the film. It was an invasion that wiped out a quarter of the region’s population, part of the largest global conflict in human history that saw the loss of tens of millions of people. The inevitable truth of the matter is that people like Flyora are the lucky ones. They survived. The most horrible stories are buried beneath the dirt in the souls of the dead, who were ripped from their own bodies. No amount of film, not even this two and a half hour one, can even begin to comprehend the immense scope of war, genocide, atrocity. But I don’t believe that to be Come and See’s goal here. Yes, the film says, war is terrible, and inhumane and ruins the lives of everyone involved, but it does not end there. We do not suffer aimlessly. There is a reason that lies beneath our suffering, and all of this is illustrated in the film’s final ten minutes. For the whole duration of the film, Elem Klimov, the director of Come and See, has expertly crafted the viewer into the hellscape of Flyora’s current existence, primarily through use of close-ups. There are so many incredible shots in the film that are just of characters and their reactions to the world unraveling around them, whether it be Flyora clutching his head in a vain attempt to shut out the tragedy around him, or the young woman wandering around helplessly with a whistle hanging from her lips after being gang raped by Nazi soldiers. It drives home the inescapability of war, as their faces cover the entire screen and the audience is unable to look away. They are forced to see, as seeing is believing, and believing is knowing that what happened was real, was tangible, was undeniable. Flyora needs not to see this, he is a witness. He can take all these experiences with him and turn it into action. He could turn his tragedy into bitterness, rightfully so. He has seen his family murdered, his friends cut down, his innocent countrymen slain in a fascistic pursuit of doomed glory. But despite all these horrific events, Flyora chooses to fight. This is why the final scenes of the film are so crucial. They are the ones that reveal the entire truth of Come and See. When Flyora fires at the picture of Hitler, it is the first time he raises his gun in the entire film. Think about that. Not even when his life was on the line could Flyora shoot, but here, face to face with the one man who caused all this suffering, he finally lets loose. He fires for any possible chance of vengeance that might come from killing the embodiment of hate and evil in the world. But suddenly, when the montage of Hitler’s past concludes with an image of an infant Adolf in his mother’s lap, before he rose to power, before he wrote Mein Kampf, before he served in World War One, before he bought into any of the fanatical nationalistic ideas that drove him to commit the most horrendous genocide in the history of the world, Flyora is unable to fire one last time. And this, this right here, is the main separation between him and his subjugators. There is an argument in conventional philosophy that Nazis were simply a product of the environment they lived in. They saw everyone else around them support obvious hatred, and were compelled to join in. It was societal factors that led to the rise of Nazism. I just can’t bring myself to believe this, however. People in Nazi Germany bought into Hitler’s philosophies because they wanted to. It was so much easier to believe that Jewish citizens were an alien, inhumane force, that communists and their allies were the reason Germany had fallen on hard times after World War One (a quick little reminder that Hitler didn’t actually hate the United States and was a fan of their system of societal segregation). Putting any blame on themselves, to look inward and realize that nationalism and anti-semitism were bad and toxic to German society, was far too inconvenient. And if people decide to believe in lies for long enough, it is not long before those lies manifest into truths. But the truth is something far more sacred. The truth is blatant. The truth is that Nazi forces devastated Belarus during World War Two, scarring it for decades. The truth is that you, Flyora, and I are different from Nazis. The reason this is the truth is that we fight back. Flyora spares this metaphorical Hitler’s life as a direct contrast to the Nazis ordering the Perekhodians to leave their children behind. What the German officer said was true, it does all start with children. But it doesn’t have to end there. We are allowed to become something more, even Flyora in his traumatized state, even Hitler and all he was destined to be. But if you decide to become a fascist, you know damn well I’ll be fighting against you. This is what makes Come and See so much more powerful than your typical anti-war film. It’s the greatest film of all time simply because it has to be. What other film can take you in, show you the worst of humanity, and insist, “this will happen again unless you stop it. It has happened before. It is happening now. You came. You saw. You know this all to be true. Now is the time to stop it. For you owe it all to them.”

Free Palestine

Fight the power.

Eli Geisler, signing off in support of the end of violence in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and wherever injustice remains.