The Invasion

Original title: The Invasion

Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa

Length: 145 min.

Country: Ukraine

Year: 2024

Premiere: Cannes 2024

Synopsis: the two years of the full scale invasion of Russia, seen through the lenses of documentarist Sergei Loznitsa.

RATING: 4/5

REVIEW

It was only a matter of time for Sergei Loznitsa to address the full scale invasion of Ukraine directly in his works - and the result, The Invasion, is both urgent and an important page in the cinematic documents on the topic.

Similarly to In Ukraine, directed by Tomas Wolski (who edited a film with Loznitsa) and Piotr Pawlus (who is one of the directors of photography of this feature), The Invasion represents the social consequences of war rather than the war itself. A pervasive presence of military uniforms in all social gatherings, the countless funerals, the elementary schools; geographically, the film seems to move from Kyiv closer and closer to the frontline, with the damaged houses increasing, the closer explosion sounds, the bigger desolation.

An important choice by Loznitsa is the depiction of the ideological impact of the war: the slogans, and speeches, but also the education at school, or the reading habits - particularly harrowing is the sequence that sees books labeled as "russian culture", with names such as Dostoevskij, Pushkin, Mayakovskij, being trashed and destroyed at dump sites.

Distance is strength in Loznitsa's signature style: although the filmmaker does subtly clarify his alignment, the medium or long frames of the film maintain a lack of intervention, this apparent coldness, and thus the film refrains from an explicit judgement and, very simply, it shows, providing room for the critical thinking of the viewer - something rather uncommon in the recent sub-genre of documentaries about the Ukraine war, often relying on an emotional involvement of the viewer.

Among everything else, Sergei Loznitsa's documentary is, first of all, necessary: it presents a reality that has to be seen, sets the premises for the questions that need to be asked, with a post-truth lucidity that rarely can be seen in documentaries on the subject.