War Is Hell - Come and See

Review of the film Come and See directed by Elem Klimov.

Here is the trailer:


Florya is a young Beylorussian (now Belarus) man that wants to join up with the partisans to fight the Nazis. He is hardly more than a boy. There isn't much of a story here, to be honest. We are watching a young man live through the most horrific experiences war has to offer. Over and over again. Nonetheless the movie is very powerful. We've seen some pretty graphic and raw war movies in modern cinema. This movie pretty much tops them all in my opinion, in depicting just how despicable humankind can be. It is unrelenting, and the filmmakers play a trick on us by physically aging Florya's face as the movie unfolds. Though very little time actually passes from the beginning of the film to the end, Florya experiences several lifetimes of terror.


We are told by this film that the Nazis burned down 627 Beylorussian villages together with all the people in them. The director Klimov lived through the devastation of Stalingrad as a child and put some of his experience into the story. He never made another film after Come and See. I don't know how he could have.

One interesting tidbit: The title refers to a passage in Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelations, "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."

One more, and this one is shocking: They used real ammunition in all the guns in this movie!

How to give a rating to a movie like this? You don't enjoy it, you endure it. That was, however, the filmmakers' intention. And from a technical aspect the movie was great. I'm going to give it 4 **** stars.