In the Fog (В ТУМАНЕ). 2012. Germany/Russia/Latvia/Netherlands/Belarus. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Strand Releasing. In Russian; English subtitles. 127 min.
We like our wars to be tidy and morally just, our heroes and villains clearly delineated. But things are never so simple in Sergei Loznitsa’s films, not least in this gripping fictional account of a Russian railway worker in Nazi-occupied Belarus who is captured with a group of rail saboteurs and then released, leading the local partisans to suspect he’s a collaborator. “The forest is an abyss of history,” Peter Bradshaw writes in The Guardian, “where Sushenya must undergo a spiritual ordeal. In the Fog is an intense, slow-burning and haunting drama.” Based on a short story by Vasil Bykaŭ, In the Fog unfurls in long takes that deepen the pervasive sense of menace and mistrust in every decision and every act, as neighbor turns against neighbor, caught between two imperatives: the instinct for self-preservation and the sacrifice for a greater good.