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SNIPER: THE WHITE RAVEN
Director: Marian Bushan Cast: Pavlo Aldoshyn, Andriy Mostrenko, Maryna Koshkina, Roman Semysal, Oleg Drach, Roman Yasinovskyi, Oleg Shulga MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:00 Release Date: 7/1/22 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 30, 2022 One could see Sniper: The White Raven, a Ukrainian film that ends—and, hence, doesn't come to a resolution—in February 2022 outside of Kyiv, as a piece of military recruitment propaganda, but that categorization simplifies the moral murkiness that's present in co-writer/director Marian Bushan's film. This is a story about being driven to fight for one's country by forces beyond one's control, yes, but it's also one that clearly communicates the cost of the drive, the fight, and the inescapable nature of devoting oneself to a cause. On the more propagandistic front, we have the setup to the story (from Bushan and Mykola Voronin's screenplay), which begins around the time of Euro-Maidan Revolution in 2014 but is set in the Donbas region of the country. Mykola (Pavlo Aldoshyn), a high school physics teacher, lives an eco-friendly life with his pregnant wife Nastya (Maryna Koshkina) in a hillside hut away from civilization. Unaware of the Russian invasion of Crimea, Mykola goes to school, finds it empty, and returns home to discover two Russian soldiers attacking his wife. They burn the couple's home and, when Nastya runs at them with a rock, kill her. As a result, Mykola enlists in a volunteer Ukrainian army, undergoes intense regimented and off-the-clock training, and is sent off to learn to become a sniper. The former pacifist, now determined to defend his homeland and avenge his wife, ends up at the top of his class and is regularly sent out on difficult missions by the unit's captain (played by Andriy Mostrenko). The rest of the plot involves those missions, which are straightforward in many ways at first (An assault on a Russian checkpoint also saves an innocent hostage) and become trickier in terms of tactics and morality as they progress. In one ambush, Mykola spots a former student of his through the scope of his rifle, and in Aldoshyn's nuanced performance, we can hear the weight of both regret and acceptance in his statement that both the young man and himself made decisions that led to these consequences. On the formulaic side, there's a central villain, a cold-hearted Russian sniper (played by Oleg Drach) who records his kills to demoralize his surviving foes, but he exists mainly to give the plot some shape, while also pushing Mykola deeper and deeper into a life revolving around conflict and nothing else. A sudden, four-year jump in the narrative serves as a jarring moment of realization when we see just how much our protagonist has become completely enveloped in that way of life. The action/suspense scenes are defined mostly by patience, just as the story of Sniper: The White Raven slowly uncovers a grim and almost fatalistic reality of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In this place under constant threat, a soldier's life can never really begin, because the job is never really finished. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity)
