Come and See

The invasion of a village in Belarus by German forces sends young Flyora into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Flyora finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.

Come and See is widely regarded as one of the most viscerally overwhelming war films ever made, combining hallucinatory imagery with an unflinching portrayal of Nazi atrocities in Belarus that leaves little room for the viewer to breathe. Early critics were largely in agreement about the film's visual power and the remarkable central performance from non-professional Aleksei Kravchenko, though some took issue with the sentimentality of its closing movement.