Critic Reviews

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.

Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region.

The Belarus-born Loznitsa, now a Ukrainian citizen, is not a follower of the “brevity is the soul of wit” school of dark humour. Each vignette is almost too long to earn that descriptor, almost as if he doesn’t want to let go of a scene until the viewer is utterly uncomfortable. But that churn builds on itself, taking us by the last act to a dark and cynical place.

The film’s displays of humour give away to harsher scenes of brutality and intense moments where rural calm is suddenly disrupted by mortar explosions and transformed landscapes dotted with corpses.

Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.

Corruption and humiliation are the guiding forces of Donbass, resulting in a scathing portrait of a society where human interaction has descended to a level of barbarity more in keeping with late antiquity than the so-called contemporary civilized world.

For many of us, especially in the West, the film is likely to be confusing here and there. It would have been helpful, for example, if the subtitles had let us know who's speaking Russian and who's speaking Ukrainian. But it is worth a bit of confusion for a film so powerful and immediate, and made with such a lucid artistic vision.

In strict terms of craft, Donbass is an impressive achievement, but its heavy-handedness nevertheless feels inordinate.

It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles).