A film is not an experience one always leaves enriched or entertained. Sometimes, it is an ordeal. A rite of passage that sears scars onto the retina and into the soul, forever altering our perception of what cinema, as an art form, can and must do. Elem Klimov’s Come and See (its Italian title almost scandalously reductive compared to the biblical, apocalyptic imperative of the original Idi i smotri, “Come and see”) is not a war film. It is war. It is a descent into the inferno without a Virgil to guide you, a total immersion in horror that offers no catharsis, only the chilling, ineluctable awareness of the abyss.

Made in 1985 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, Klimov’s film is the antithesis of all triumphalist rhetoric. Where Western war cinema, even in its most critical incarnations like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, tends to mythologize or aestheticize madness through opera, psychedelia, or an almost cool cynicism, Klimov performs a radically opposite operation. He empties the genre of every possible conventional narrative foothold, of all recognizable heroism, to deliver a pure sensory and psychological experience, a hyperrealism that constantly spills over into a waking nightmare. His is not the journey of a Willard towards a Kurtz, that mythological and literary figure; it is the via crucis of an ordinary boy, Flyora, whose face becomes the map on which trauma etches its premature wrinkles, transforming him into a spectral old man in a matter of hours.

Flyora’s journey begins with an almost playful, almost sacred act: unearthing a rifle to join the Belarusian partisans. It is the last gesture of a childhood about to be annihilated. From that moment, Klimov drags us along with him, using Aleksei Rodionov’s Steadicam not as the fluid, omniscient eye of a Kubrick, but as a crazed seismograph registering every shudder, every breathless run, every terrified glance. Often, Flyora turns and stares into the camera, and thus at us. This is no Brechtian wink to remind us of the fiction; it is a direct accusation, a summons to bear witness. “Come and see,” the title commands us, and the protagonist’s gaze does not allow us to look away, making us silent accomplices to an atrocity that unfolds in almost real time, dilated and suffocating.

The film's soundscape is an infernal architecture. The initial bombardment leaves Flyora partially deaf, and Klimov translates this trauma into a brilliant and tormenting sound design: a constant whistle, a drone that both isolates the boy from the world and amplifies his inner chaos. Upon this canvas of tinnitus are woven the diegetic sounds—the coarse laughter of German soldiers, the weeping of children, the buzz of flies on a corpse—and a musical score that works in chilling counterpoint. A fragment of Mozart may emerge from the chaos only to be swallowed by screams, creating an emotional short-circuit that denies any possibility of aesthetic consolation. It is the soundtrack to the decomposition of civilization.

If one were to seek a pictorial parallel, one would have to leave cinema behind and turn to Goya’s “The Disasters of War” or, even more precisely, to the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Klimov, like the Flemish master, populates his frames with a grotesque and telluric horror, where evil wears not the demonic mask of propaganda, but the banal, drunken, and festive face of human cruelty. The long, unbearable sequence of the massacre in the barn is the film's black heart. We see almost none of the explicit violence. The camera remains outside with Flyora, forcing us to imagine the unimaginable, to hear the screams that merge with the raucous laughter and gramophone music of the Einsatzgruppen officers. The true horror, Klimov suggests, is not death, but the dehumanization that precedes and celebrates it. It is evil as spectacle, as a macabre festival.

Klimov himself, whose own childhood was marked by the siege of Stalingrad, poured a personal and almost exorcistic urgency into the film. He spent eight years getting the permits to realize his vision without compromise, going so far as to use live rounds that whistled inches from the head of his young actor, Aleksei Kravchenko. This is no production anecdote for thrill-seekers, but the key to understanding the film’s ethic: to depict hell, you must brush against its flames, you must refuse the safety of fiction. Kravchenko, chosen for his almost medium-like sensitivity, was subjected to immense psychological stress, with hypnotists on set to help him manage the trauma. His on-screen aging is not makeup; it is the physical testimony of an experience that transcended acting to become lived reality.

But the definitive masterstroke, the one that elevates Come and See to a meta-textual and philosophical masterpiece, is the ending. After the village is liberated, Flyora finds a portrait of Hitler in the mud. In a fit of cathartic rage, he begins to shoot at it. With each shot, Klimov edits history in reverse, in a furious, impossible rewind: Nazi parades, the rise to power, the Munich Putsch, youth, childhood... down to a final, shocking image: a photograph of the infant Adolf Hitler, held in his mother’s arms. Flyora, his rifle still aimed, hesitates. His face, now a mask of ancestral suffering, contorts. He does not shoot.

In this temporal chiasmus, Klimov does not merely condemn evil. He poses the most radical and terrible question: can one kill evil at its source, when it is still innocence? Is it possible to eradicate an idea by shooting the child who will come to embody it? Flyora’s answer, and Klimov’s, is a silent, devastating no. One cannot “un-create” history. The impossibility of that final act is an admission of a cosmic impotence in the face of the cycle of violence and the root of evil, which is not some monstrous aberration but a latent potential within humanity itself. Flyora cannot kill the child, because it would mean becoming like those he fought, those who burned children in the barn. It is the breaking point, the moment when vengeance collides with the last shred of humanity.

Come and See is a total and terrifying work of art, a cinematic experience that is closer to a dispatch from a war zone of the soul than a work of fiction. It offers no answers, no heroes, no hope. It offers only a testimony. It is cinema as scar tissue, a dark monolith in the landscape of the seventh art that reminds us of its power not only to entertain or to inspire dreams, but also to force us to look, unfiltered, upon the face of Medusa. And to be forever changed.