Mark Reviews Movies: BURIAL

Burial, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 1, 2022

Writer/director Ben Parker's Burial finally arrives at a salient and sobering point about history—who tells it, why they do so, how the inevitable passage of time makes it more difficult for humanity to remember the what and the why. The bulk of the narrative itself is a bit of alternative history, in which a group of Soviet soldiers are transporting cargo so important to history that they're willing to die in order to prevent it from getting into the wrong hands. Does the movie's existence as a piece of speculative history detract from its message? It's difficult to tell, because the routine of the story being told does most of that work before Parker gets to his final point.

That's made in the movie's bookend prologue and epilogue, set at the end of 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolves on the TV news and an older woman named Anna (Harriet Walter) discovers she has an intruder (played by David Alexander) in her home. The man is a neo-Nazi, whom the woman renders unconscious and shackles to a radiator. He's convinced that Anna, a Jewish woman who emigrated from Russia to London, is in possession of evidence that Adolf Hitler survived the war and escaped to an anonymous life. She knows something about the rumor, to be sure, and the rest of the movie is the story she tells this invader.

It's set at the end of the war, as a younger Anna, then known as Brana (Charlotte Vega) and working for the Soviet intelligence agency, is one of only four people who know the content of a human-sized, coffin-like crate that needs to be transported from Berlin to Moscow. Two of those who know are Soviet Army officer Tor (Barry Ward) and the truck driver, and the fourth is Joseph Stalin himself, who has ordered that this cargo be delivered safely, quickly, and personally to him.

The contents of the crate are treated as a bit of a secret, although it's not hard to determine what or, given the size of the container, who is inside the package. Parker's story follows Brana and the team, who bury the crate every night when they stop (In case they're all killed, there's a chance no one will find the container) and argue about why they have to disrupt their victory celebration to perform this errand.

Leading the side of that irritation is Vadim (Dan Renton Skinner), another army officer who wants to get his well-earned "spoils" of war during one of the group's nightly stops. In the woods near the town that he and some of his men visit in order to drink and terrorize a young bar maiden, a group of German soldiers, nicknamed the "Werewolves," are unaware or uncaring that their side has lost the war. Their leader Wölfram (Kristjan Üksküla) suspects he knows what's in the crate, too. He wants it in order to keep a certain political narrative and the possibility of a conspiracy alive.

Despite the inherent mystery and political intrigue here, the plot essentially becomes a game of pursuit, evasion, and multiple shootouts between the Russians and the German hold-outs. Helping the former is Lukasz (Tom Felton), a Polish-German man who, with the war finished, finds himself targeted by both locals and the remnants of the occupying force, on account of the other half of his heritage. He's "trapped between two wolves," as he tells Brana, who knows something of that, too, being Jewish and fighting against and for governments that despise her own heritage to varying degrees. Meanwhile, Tor recalls lamenting how the Soviet military became like the vicious caricatures Nazi propaganda painted them as—until he and others discovered the death camps and realized there are no victors, only survivors, in this war.

There are some quiet and thoughtful moments in Parker's tale, such as those conversations. For the most part, though, these characters exist as components of the team of protagonists, trying to accomplish a straightforward but somewhat confounding mission (Brana suggests it's a Russian thing, which isn't too convincing a motive), or the team of antagonists, ambushing and attacking our generic heroes in order to steal the cargo for their own propagandistic ends.

The result amounts to little more than a series of firefights—a couple in the woods, one at a farmhouse where Lukasz thinks he knows a good hiding spot for the cargo, a final one in a church. The choreography and editing of these actions sequences don't particular compensate for the absence of much character development or a clear-eyed reason to care about the fate of something that's really a foregone conclusion as soon as it's revealed.

The surprise, then, is how the epilogue succinctly puts the underlying ideas here into a context that transcends how formulaic the story within the framing device actually is. That doesn't elevate the bulk of Burial, but it certainly leaves one with a lot to consider—mostly about the movie that could have been if Parker had put as much thought into the plot as he does the ultimate meaning of his story.

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