People (Ludzie) review – multi-thread epic offers raw tales from the Russia-Ukraine war | Film

This portmanteau film – produced by Warsaw Film School and released for the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – is in the Come and See tradition: a near-phantasmagoric descent into the brutalising reality of the battlefield. Equally anti-war and anti-Russia, its interconnected stories kick off in the faintly theatrical and moralist mode sometimes seen in east European drama, before accelerating for the climax into a bravura cinematic sequence: a baby’s point of view on Russian pillaging and destruction.

The film is comprised of five threads: an unnamed Polish traveller (Cezary Pazura) arrives in Ukraine to meet his doctor lover (Oksana Cherkashyna), but is sidetracked into taking a group of orphans with visual impairments to the zoo. Tasked with escorting the kids back over the border, he stops in at her parents’ house – but the old war hero (Hryhorii Bokovenko) and his wife (Nina Naboka) refuse to abandon it. Tatiana Yurikova plays a blinged-up Russian mother who has paid her way to the frontline to look for her missing son; it turns out he is in a Ukrainian hospital bed and appalling the doctor we have already seen with his opinions on Russian superiority. And finally, the frame story, seen in bleary cot-cam: a huddle of Ukrainian women in a basement hidey-hole.

Not every section of this wartime story-scrum has the desired impact; the senior-citizen portion, especially, feels like padding. And, arranged in nonlinear fashion, the interconnections don’t snap with as much dramatic force as they could – even if the poetic linkages, like the balloon animal from the zoo that later floats over the corpse incinerator in the third plotline, are neat. But some segments register on their own terms, like the callous satire of the Russian mother, in her Gucci jacket and Putin sweatshirt, begging a monstrous crematorium boss for mercy.

Elsewhere, the three partially sighted wastrels, left to scramble alone through the ruins, gather metaphorical moss as symbols of universal wartime confusion. This rallying call for lost innocence reaches an unbearable pitch in the final section; filmed in long takes from underneath the cot-arch, Russian thugs violate the women from the cellar, until one of them (Maria Shtofa) flees into the chaos of invasion. It’s raw but epic film-making with an instinctive grasp of the obscenity of war.