Achrome review – World War II drama taps into a never-ending note of misery

The final shot of Achrome, the second feature by Russian filmmaker Mariya Ignatenko, rests for about 10 minutes on a group of Nazi soldiers atop a ditch they’ve just filled with murdered women. Situated somewhere in the Baltic states during World War II, they sit with the bodies in various jokey poses whilst a camera shutter clicks away. Every few seconds they change position, finding new ways to abuse the dead, smiling buffoonishly, having the time of their lives. It hammers home the dehumanising process of fascism – an ideology whose purpose is predicated on the complete alienation of our humanity, to the point where mutilated corpses can be reinterpreted as mannequins for pleasure.

Unfortunately, Achrome has a similarly alienated and obtuse vision of its own protagonists, envisioning them as nothing more than vessels through which to pass a few vague observations that most viewers will have seen a million times over – namely that war is hell and that fascism is bad, actually.

Achrome is shot in the slow cinema style that seems to have become de rigueur on the European festival circuit as shorthand for serious, portentous cinema, notwithstanding that its most masterful practitioners – be they Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang or the long-retired Bela Tarr – always have levity, purpose, and – most importantly – rhythm to their work, no matter how slow or punishing. These filmmakers reach into the lethargy of their styles and find something imperceptibly profound in it, challenging us to slow down our daily rhythms and search for different perspectives. A different perspective is, after all, one of the things that makes film so invigorating.

But not here. Achrome has no perspective to speak of – just a series of slow, dirge-like scenes connected by the loosest of plots. In this case, local peasant Maris (Georgiy Bergal) decides to join the Wehrmacht as a means of survival. Trapped in a never-ending hellscape, he decides to take it upon himself to try and rescue a woman held captive by the Nazis. The fact that the Wehrmacht commandeers a monastery to carry out raids on the nearby territory is supposed to connect the events in Achrome to a wider sense of religious belonging, faith and redemption – and perhaps also to the utter devotion required of both fascism and religious fanaticism, of which Maris has more than a touch.

But not a single image here connects emotionally, because everything is played as a single, never-ending note of misery. The screen is an endless scrawl of brown, with every scene shot through with mist, fog, and ethereal diffuse light (perhaps to suggest our characters are already in the afterlife). Ultimately, the film’s relationship to its protagonists, who observe much of the nastiness in near-silence, feels pathological. They are mere bags of bones, treated with the same indifference as the bodies of that harrowing final shot.

Achrome was screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.