KLONDIKE (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Klondike, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 3, 2023

Some kind of explosion, likely from artillery fire, has blown a massive hole in the side of the couple's house. What's to be done about it? For the husband and wife at the center of Klondike, the only things to do are to clean up the mess, keep going about their lives, and dream of the bay window they'll put in that empty space when the fighting around them has stopped. This isn't a solution to the problem, of course, but this is neither the time nor the place for the luxury of straightforward solutions.

Writer/director Maryna Er Gorbach's film is set during the early months of the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, between locals and Russia-backed separatist groups, as well as the increasingly belligerent country itself. It's specifically July 17, 2014, a date that might not mean much to many, especially considering the escalation of this conflict over a decade. It is, though, a date with a specific significance in how the world became aware of the sheer inhumanity of the Russian government and its controlled forces.

All of this—the fighting, the shelling, the specific tragedy that occurs within the first act—happens in the background of the lives of Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and her husband Tolik (Serhii Shadrin). She is seven months pregnant, and he is playing both sides of the conflict as much as he can in order to try to keep things as ordinary as possible. Tolik's neighbor and friend Sanya (Oleh Shevchuk) is a separatist sympathizer, who regularly borrows Tolk's van to perform various errands for the local mercenaries, and Irka's brother Yaryk (Oleh Shchebyna) has returned from Kyiv to convince his sister to leave this rural area, only to suspect that his brother-in-law is fighting on the side of Russia.

There is so much potential for interpersonal and broader conflict in Er Gorbach's story, as familial tensions rise, separatist soldiers move ever closer to the couple's home, and the mercenaries shoot down a commercial airliner bound for Malaysia. Much of the focus, though, remains on the horrific consequences, which become terribly normal within this setting—such as how Tolik slaughters the couple's cow to prevent providing separatists with free food, as well as and especially in the quickly routine effort to find and collect the victims of the attack on the plane. The director offers a series of patient and barely moving one-takes of such scenes, leaving us feeling as trapped and helpless as these characters become.

It's all about trying to maintain or reclaim some kind of normalcy, as Tovik fixes the house's TV satellite dish, even as a plume of smoke from the crash rises in the distance, while Irka attempts to assuage the hostility between her husband and brother by making them do chores. Despite those efforts, Klondike rises toward a dreadful crescendo of occupation and violence, ending on a shot so bleak that it's impossible to imagine anything here being normal again.

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