The Most Unbearably Intense War Documentary You'll Ever See

Yahoo

29-01-2025

The term 'up close and personal' may be overused in conversations about movies, but rarely has that description been more applicable than with 2000 Meters to Andriivka. AP video journalist and Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol director Mstyslav Chernov's latest is must-see non-fiction cinema, recounting a Ukrainian battalion's efforts to liberate a town from Russian forces during the country's 2023 counteroffensive. Shot from the perspectives of its director and various soldiers as they engage in unholy battle, it's a harrowing first-person view of a ceaseless nightmare, defined by both blistering immediacy and crushing sadness.
Late in his film, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Chernov opines that the longer the war goes on, the less the rest of the world will care. If that's so, 2000 Meters to Andriivka restores the horror, tragedy, and urgency of the ongoing calamity, thrusting audiences into a maelstrom that resembles a Hollywood action blockbuster, or AAA video game, except without the comforting veneer of artifice that makes bloodshed entertaining.
There's only terror and suffering in this deeply scarred country, and particularly in the 2000-meter stretch of countryside leading to Andriivka, a small village on the outskirts of Bakhmut that, as of Sept. 16, 2023, is occupied by Vladimir Putin's armed forces. The 3rd Assault Brigade seeks to take back Andriivka and, once that goal is accomplished, to raise a Ukrainian flag in its center. They know this community is now rubble and ash, yet as commander Fedya says, victory will mean reclaiming their land and the village's name, after which they can rebuild.
Fedya's dream notwithstanding, 2000 Meters to Andriivka is a film about death and destruction, and it opens with helmet-cam footage of an earlier battalion's attempts to make progress toward Andriivka. In it, soldiers hunker down in crudely dug trenches as mortars whizz overhead and then crash, suddenly and violently, near their positions.
They eventually emerge from their hiding spot to escape via an armored personnel carrier, but it gets stuck in the mud, forcing them to exit back into no man's land. There, a blast breaks one soldier's arms and legs. The individual whose camera is filming this mayhem is struck too, his leg badly hurt. As he moans in pain, he's dragged back to a dugout, where he stares upward as projectiles fly and smoke billows across the clear sky.
Having set its intensely disturbing tone, 2000 Meters to Andriivka temporarily retreats to the 3rd Assault Brigade's headquarters, where plans are made to fight, inch by inch, to Andriivka. Though he's told that 'we're idiots for wanting to go,' Chernov hops a ride and joins them, thereby documenting the war from the same in-your-face POV as the helmet-cam material shot by Ukrainian soldiers.
No blue journalism vests will protect the director from the ruthless enemy's fire (in fact, that garb would make him a 'priority target'), and just as his fate appears dire, so too is his narration despairing, not simply due to the tremendous loss of life wrought by this mission, but because so little has been gained. The cost, it's apparent, is quickly outweighing the reward.
The sole way to reach Andriivka is via a forest squeezed on both sides by fields decorated with Russian landmines. To call this area a 'forest,' however, is to oversell it, since it's really a strip of charred, branchless trees surrounded by decimated brush and shallow foxholes. 2000 Meters to Andriivka mires itself in this hellscape, where debris and corpses are an equally common sight, and where 'taking cover' sounds like a joke; these soldiers are lucky if they can find a thick tree, abundant bush or still-intact structure behind which to hide.
On their way to rendezvous with Fedya (who responds to each Russian shelling with an admiring, 'Not bad' or 'Nice'), the battalion meets up with second-in-command Freak, a 22-year-old who talks to the director about transitioning from speaking Russian to Ukrainian, and about how much he pines for a shower. This warrior is just a kid who joined the army after Russian invaded. Over shots of him talking with comrades, Chernov informs us that five months from now, he'll be injured in a battle, his body never found.
Death doesn't just hover over the proceedings—it seems to be in every frame, waiting to strike. Pressing onward, the brigade suffers numerous injuries and casualties, at least one of which is seen in 2000 Meters to Andriivka's most shocking, wrenching scene.
With an ominously sparse, pulsating score that at times recalls John Williams' Jaws theme (a rather apt allusion considering the monstrousness on display), Chernov's film captures the dread and agony of combat like few before it. It's equally somber during the battalion's down time, such as when it briefly shifts its gaze away from the battlefield and to the small town where one fallen soldier grew up. His funeral is this community's 56th since the war began, and yet that doesn't lessen the tears of the mother who lies weeping against her son's casket.
In its many first-person firefight sequences, 2000 Meters to Andriivka can't help but resemble Call of Duty. The difference, though, is that there's nothing exciting about the carnage presented here; the overarching mood, even in triumph, is brutally bleak. Intermittent audio montages of media reports help place the battalion's progress in the context of Ukraine's larger campaign, and as anyone who's followed this story from its start knows, the news isn't good.
'It's like landing on a planet where everything's trying to kill you,' is how one combatant describes the path to Andriivka. The rest do their best to grapple with the prospect of their imminent demise, nastily decry their adversaries (whom they uniformly refer to as 'motherf--ckers' and 'cocks--kers'), and ponder their legacy, such as a 46-year-old chain-smoker who wonders, 'How do you think the camera can make you look like a hero if you're not a hero?'
2000 Meters to Andriivka's action is almost unbearably anxiety-inducing, and its portrait of these soldiers' bravery and selflessness makes it all the more heartbreaking. Trapped in hell, these young men are compelled by duty to risk everything for their land. Honoring them by shining a spotlight on their sacrifice and the war's viciousness, Chernov immortalizes their names. His film is their raised flag.