The Load

This is one of the year’s best films.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story, especially when the picture they form is so harrowing. But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.

Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.

As intelligently crafted as the film is, Glavonić’s directorial strategies do end up limiting the film’s observational power.

If any colour represents the long-term impact of war, it’s the blend of beige and grey that fills The Load’s quietly powerful frames.

This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.