A harrowing and haunting work of visual grandeur, Come and See devastated audiences and earned the Grand Prize at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival. Russian director Elem Klimov's final picture presents a hallucinatory vision of World War II as seen through the eyes of a terrified teenaged boy, juxtaposing moments of poetic sensitivity with shocking passages of violence and inhumanity. Telling its tale in strictly cinematic terms, Come and See recalls the psychedelic existentialism of Apocalypse Now while foreshadowing the subjective and hyperreal perspectives of later films such as Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.

The story's young protagonist, Florya (played with remarkable range and intensity by 13-year-old Alexei Kravchenko), is first seen enjoying an afternoon of make-believe war games in battle-ravaged Belarus. Flush with the fervor of imagined heroics, Florya later jumps at the chance to join a makeshift squad of Soviet partisans who are planning an attack against Nazi forces in the region. When he is left behind by the group's leader, Florya links up with a beautiful peasant girl (an otherworldly Olga Mironova) who offers him a chance at emotional salvation. But the two are soon caught in a thunderous forest bombing, which forces them to set out on a grueling journey of survival through a perilous landscape that closely resembles hell.

Shot by Aleksei Rodionov (Orlando), Come and See presents one unforgettable sequence after another: the girl's rapturous dance in a pouring forest rain; the children's gruesome discovery of German butchery in Florya's village; and, most memorably, the boy's first face-to-face encounter with the Nazis, whose operatic acts of cruelty betray mankind's ugliest impulses.

Klimov partially based Come and See on some of his own childhood experiences. Born in Stalingrad (now Volograd) in 1933, he and his mother and infant brother were evacuated across the Volga River on a large raft during the Battle of Stalingrad. "The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky," he recalled in an interview with The New York Times. "The river was also burning because the German bombings had destroyed something carrying oil. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them."

The filmmaker drew further inspiration from The Khatyn Story, a novella by Alex Adamovich, a prominent author who fought as a teenager during the war. Klimov co-wrote the screenplay for Come and See with Adamovich, who prepared the film's extras by reading passages from another of his books, I Am From the Fiery Village, which incorporated testimonies from survivors of the atrocities in Belarus.

Technically, Come and See is a tour de force, using sound and cinematography to create vivid and realistic atmospheres. After Florya is rendered deaf by the forest bombing, the sounds around him are muted and distorted; Rodionov's camerawork is equally expressive and immersive, presenting unblinking, experiential views of the mounting horrors that the boy encounters.

The standard-edition DVD of Come and See offers a clean transfer and good-quality sound, but the only extras are theatrical trailers, a reprint of the New York Times piece and a short text endorsement by actor Sean Penn, who found the film to be "a masterpiece not only of filmmaking but of humanity itself." Film buffs are advised to seek out the more complete special-edition DVD, which offers two photo galleries of production stills, interviews with the cast and crew, and archival materials about the war's impact on the Belarus region.

The conflict's impact on Klimov is made clear in his comments to the Times: "After Come and See, I lost interest in making films," he told interviewer Nancy Ramsey. "Everything that was possible I felt I had already done. I think of lines written by Andrei Piatonov to his wife, 'Toward the impossible our souls fly.' In Come and See, what I ended up filming was a lightened-up version of the truth. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

- Stephen Pizzello