Come and See Review

Klimov's method is proximity. The Steadicam stays at Flyora's eye level for most of the film, and Aleksei Kravchenko, cast at fourteen, is repeatedly turned to face the lens so the audience is given no third-person vantage on what he sees. His face is the special effect: hairline receding, eyes flattening, a boy converted into an old man across two hours with barely any makeup. The sound is the second weapon. A bomb blast leaves a ringing that does not clear, and Klimov keeps it under the dialogue for whole sequences, so birdsong and voices arrive through a wall of damage.

The bog crossing, the cow lit by tracer fire, the barn at Perekhody with a village pushed inside it, these are staged with documentary flatness rather than montage. Dialogue is deliberately minimal, functional and often screamed, which is a real limit if you want characters rather than witnesses. The closing rewind through newsreel, running history backward toward an infant Hitler, is the one moment Klimov argues instead of shows, and then stops short of the erasure he wants.