Every essay before this one has been about what a film leaves behind.
A cello. A phone call. A swing in the snow. A key you kept. A grammar you corrected. A door you didn’t open. A field you’ve never walked through. A glass partition. A warehouse you built around yourself.
This essay is about what a film takes away.
Come and See will remove something from you. I cannot tell you precisely what it is, because the thing it removes does not have a name. It is not innocence, though that word is the one most often used. Innocence is too clean, too literary, too recoverable. What the film takes is closer to a layer. A membrane. Something between you and the world that has been doing a job you never noticed it doing: the job of making the world survivable. The job of letting you read the news and feel something and then make dinner. The job of letting you know, in the abstract, that human beings are capable of atrocity, while also letting you function as though this knowledge is theoretical.
After Come and See, it is no longer theoretical.
I need to say something before we go further.
I am not going to describe the worst of what this film shows. Not because I want to protect you. You don’t need protection from a description. But because describing it would give you the impression that the film’s power lies in its graphic content, and it doesn’t. There are more visually explicit war films. There are films with higher body counts, more detailed violence, more forensic attention to the mechanics of killing. Come and See is not trying to show you the worst thing you’ve ever seen. It is trying to make you feel the worst thing you’ve ever felt, and the difference between those two projects is the difference between a war movie and this.
This is not a war movie.
A boy named Flyora, fourteen or fifteen, digs a rifle out of the sand in a Belarusian field. It is 1943. He is going to join the partisans. He is smiling. He is a boy with a rifle, playing the oldest game there is: I am going to be a soldier, and being a soldier is going to mean something, and the meaning is going to make me larger than I am.
This is the last moment in the film that resembles any other war film you’ve seen. Everything after this is Klimov’s territory, and Klimov’s territory is a place where meaning does not apply.
Flyora does not fight. He does not have a war story in any conventional sense. He is separated from the partisans almost immediately, and what follows is a walk. A long, slow, annihilating walk through the Belarusian countryside as the Nazi Einsatzgruppen move through it, burning villages, killing everyone, not as an act of war but as an act of erasure. Flyora witnesses this. He does not participate. He does not resist. He does not save anyone. He walks through it, and the walking is the film, and by the end of the walk his face has changed.
This is not a metaphor. His face physically changes. Klimov used a combination of makeup, lighting, and something less technical, something that might simply be the effect of a young actor being put through what this actor was put through, to make Flyora’s face age over the course of the film. He enters as a boy. He exits as an old man in a boy’s body. The ageing is not graceful. It is not the kind of ageing that carries wisdom or resilience. It is the ageing of a piece of wood left in weather. Structural. Irreversible. Without meaning.
Here is what happens to you while you watch this, and I want to be careful with the sequence because the sequence is the mechanism.
For the first hour, you are watching a war film. A strange one, a deliberately disorienting one, but still recognizable. There is a boy. There is a conflict. There is a forest. There are explosions. Your nervous system knows how to process this. You have seen war films. You have a template. The template says: this will be terrible, but there will be a structure, and the structure will hold the terror in place, and at the end there will be survival or death or sacrifice, and each of these outcomes has a meaning, and the meaning will allow you to leave the film and re-enter your life with the terror contained inside a story.
The template fails.
It fails not at a single dramatic moment but gradually, the way a tool fails when the material is too hard for it. You keep trying to apply the template. You keep looking for the narrative beat that will organise what you’re seeing into something you can carry. The heroic act. The moral lesson. The turning point. The moment where Flyora’s suffering is redeemed by something, anything, a gesture of kindness, a flash of resistance, a death that means something.
It does not come. The suffering is not redeemed. It is not ennobled. It is not even witnessed in any meaningful sense, because the people who could witness it are dead, and the people who are causing it are not witnessing. They are working. They are performing a task with the efficiency of people who have done this before and will do this again and do not consider it an event.
And somewhere in this failure, somewhere in the gap between what you expected the film to provide and what the film actually provides, the membrane tears. The thing I mentioned at the beginning. The layer between you and the knowledge that this is what human beings do. Not did. Do. Are capable of. Right now. In the same bodies, with the same hands, using the same language that you use to order coffee and call your mother and say I love you.
That’s what tears. Not your innocence. Your insulation.
I am not going to describe the village scene. You will find descriptions elsewhere, and they will prepare you, and the preparation will be useless, because the scene does not work through content. It works through duration. Klimov holds the camera on what is happening for longer than you can process. Not longer than you can watch. You can watch it. That’s the problem. You can sit there and watch it because the film holds you in place with the same force that holds Flyora in place: not physical, not dramatic, but gravitational. The gravity of something so real that looking away feels like a lie.
You will not look away. And the not-looking-away will change you, because you will learn something about yourself in those minutes that you did not know and did not want to know: that you are capable of watching. That your capacity for witnessing is larger than your capacity for feeling, and the gap between those two capacities is a kind of emptiness, and the emptiness is what the film fills you with. Not horror. Emptiness. The specific emptiness of a person who has seen something that exceeds the human ability to respond to it and is left with the seeing and nothing else.
There is a moment near the end that I need to describe because it is the moment the film turns from a historical document into something else entirely.
Flyora finds a framed photograph of Hitler in the mud. He fires his rifle at it. And Klimov, in a gesture of such audacity that it barely registers as a choice, begins running history backward. Archival footage plays in reverse. The rallies unspool. The tanks retreat. The soldiers unmarch. The footage goes further back. Hitler as a young man. Hitler as a child. A photograph of Hitler as an infant, held by his mother.
Flyora is still firing.
And then he stops.
He stops at the photograph of the infant. He does not fire. He cannot kill the baby. And this refusal, this moment where the boy who has witnessed the absolute worst of what humanity can produce still cannot bring himself to kill a child, even in effigy, even in fantasy, even in the retrospective fiction of reversed footage, is the only moment in the film that resembles mercy.
But it is not mercy. It is something colder and more important. It is the film showing you the limit. The line that even a destroyed boy will not cross. And the showing of that limit does not comfort you. It terrifies you. Because the limit is so small. It is so far downstream from where the damage was done. The damage was done by adults, in full possession of their faculties, who crossed that line without hesitation, without Flyora’s pause, without the infant-shaped boundary that even a brutalised child still recognises.
The limit exists. It is not enough. Both of these things are true, and the film holds them both and does not reconcile them, and you will carry both out of the film and into a world that also holds both and also does not reconcile them.
A warning. A different kind from the ones that came before.
I am not going to tell you when to watch this film or when not to. The warnings in the other essays were calibrated: don’t watch if you’re in love, don’t watch if you’re between jobs, don’t watch on a Sunday evening. Those warnings assumed a life in which the film was a disruption. A powerful disruption, but a temporary one. Something that would rearrange a few rooms in your internal architecture and then allow you to continue.
Come and See does not rearrange rooms. It removes a floor. And you will continue afterward, because people continue, that is what people do, that is in fact one of the things the film is about. But the continuing will happen at a different elevation. Slightly lower. Slightly closer to something you didn’t know was underneath.
You will still make dinner. You will still answer emails. You will still laugh at things that are funny, and the laughter will be real. The film does not destroy your capacity for joy. That would be simpler, and this film is not simple. What it destroys is your certainty that joy and atrocity exist in separate compartments. After Come and See, they share a floor. They sit in the same room. And you will spend the rest of your life in that room, because it is the only room there is.
I want to say something about why this essay is last.
It is not because Come and See is the greatest film on this list. Greatness is not the organising principle. It is last because every other essay in this series operates on a premise that this film dissolves: the premise that what a film does to you is, in some fundamental sense, a gift. The cello you can’t unhear. The phone call you finally make. The door you didn’t know was unlocked. These are painful, yes. But they are additions. They make you more. More aware, more awake, more alive to the specific weight of being human.
Come and See does not make you more. It makes you less. It takes something away and does not replace it, and the absence is permanent, and the permanent absence is the truest thing any film in this series has left behind, because it is the only one that does not flatter you. It does not tell you that your pain makes you deeper. It does not tell you that your longing makes you beautiful. It does not tell you that the ache you carry is proof you were alive.
It tells you that a boy walked into a forest and came out old. That a village existed and then it didn’t. That the people who did this went home and had dinner. And that you, watching, will also have dinner, and that this is not hypocrisy but simply the way it works, and the way it works is the thing you now have to carry, and it is heavier than everything else in this series combined, and it does not mean anything, and you will carry it anyway.
The title is from Revelation. “Come and see.” An invitation to witness the opening of the seals, the arrival of the horsemen, the end of the world as a spectacle arranged for an audience.
Klimov uses the title without irony. He is inviting you to see. Not to understand. Not to learn. Not to become a better person. Just to see. And the seeing is the thing. The seeing is all there is. After the seeing, there is no moral. There is no lesson. There is no moment where the film turns to you and says, “Now you know, and knowing makes a difference.”
Knowing does not make a difference. That is the last thing the film takes from you: the belief that it does.
This is the tenth essay. The last room.
Nine films gave you something to carry. This one gave you something to carry too, but the something is a space, and the space is where a certainty used to be, and the certainty was this: that seeing clearly is a form of power. That awareness is a kind of armour. That if you look at the world honestly enough, the honesty protects you.
It doesn’t. Flyora looked. Flyora saw. Flyora is not protected.
You looked. You saw.
The corridor is behind you now. Ten doors. Ten rooms. Some furnished with longing, some with guilt, some with time, some with fire. You will revisit them. You will find that the rooms have changed since you first entered, because you have changed, and the rooms are inside you, and they shift when you shift.
But this room, the last one, does not shift. It stays as it was. A boy in a field. A face that aged without living. A world that did not end but should have, and didn’t, and continued, and will continue, and the continuing is not hope and not despair but something flatter and more permanent.
The film is over. The seeing is not.
Come and see.