Screen Grabs: Brutality on the ground in ‘2000 Meters to Andriivka’

When Ukrainian journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol premiered in early 2023, there were already concerns that less than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion, the West was already “tired” of the war. US conservatives in particular were whining that we’d already “done enough” to save somebody else’s democracy. In his new 2000 Meters to Andriivka, which was primarily shot later that same year, the filmmaker sighs “The longer it all goes on, the less the world will care about it.” God knows our current political environment of endless distraction and disinformation (much of the latter apparently generated by Mother Russia) helps foster such indifference. Yet the conflict is hardly less immediate for Ukrainians, whose sacrifice to save their nation is vividly illustrated in this latest piece of on-the-ground documentary reportage.

Where Mariupol depicted the siege and evacuation of the titular port city, Andriivka offers a similarly grueling, high-casualty account of reclamation: Chernov’s Associated Press crew are embedded with a Ukrainian brigade in the midst of a counteroffensive, their task liberating the titular tiny rural village from Russian forces. (Just how “Russian” are they, though? When one poor schmo named Abdul is captured, he’s obviously just cannon fodder shanghai’d from some marginal ethnic group or outlying territory. Asked by furious Ukrainian soldiers why he’s attacked their homeland, he helplessly shrugs “I don’t know why we came here.”)

As fields and roads have already been heavily mined by the enemy, the only way forward is through a “forest,” or rather the scorched remains of one. Its trees have been reduced by shelling to blackened scrub, littered with corpses. The 2000 meters, or about 6,500 feet, that must be traversed is nothing as the crow flies. But it’s a lethal eternity for combatants.

In moments of exhausted momentary repose, we grow a bit familiar with a few of the troops. Virtually none of them grew up “wanting to be a soldier”—all voluntarily left civilian lives, whether as college students or middle-aged grandfathers, to serve on front lines out of a sense of necessity. They seldom call the other side anything but “motherfuckers,” and it’s hard to contest that bitterness.

Photographed via camera helmets as our protagonists crawl, run and dive for cover under fire, the battle sequences are naturally chaotic and hard to follow; there’s none of the big-picture clarity you get in staged war dramas. But while we often can’t tell just what’s happening to whom in the moment, the consequences are very much felt. Chernov doesn’t spare us knowing that a man we’ve just seen in disarming private conversation will be dead in another five months, having survived this skirmish only to become a casualty in another. When we witness one figure’s funeral, it’s noted that his native town has already lost 50-odd sons fighting the invasion.

After what seems like an eternity, and at high cost, Andriivka is reached—a hollow victory, since Russia has left nothing but rubble behind. “The village doesn’t exist anymore,” its residents dead or gone,” and “all that is left of it is a name.” But a name is still worth preserving, perhaps someday rebuilding on. While in a dark moment one soldier worries “What if this war is until the end of our lives?,” there’s little question here that the struggle must go on. 2000 Meters to Andriivka opens Fri/1 at the Elmwood in Berkeley. Chernov will appear there for a post-screening Q&A on Sun/3, as well as at the Smith Rafael Film Center (same day), and SF’s Roxie (Sat/2).

Footage of bombed-out Ukrainian cities provide a striking start to Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton—as a camera drone pans down apartment buildings shorn of exterior walls, we see some flats with clothes still hanging in the closet. Yet somewhat frustratingly, there’s no onscreen identifying any location in these 100 minutes. So you’d have to do your homework to realize what we’re looking at there, or later when we glimpse Turkish metropolises after the catastrophic earthquakes of early 2023. These segments offer various forms of spectacle in a slow, meditative feature that ponders the role (and variable impermanence) of architecture itself.

Our nominal hero is Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, who’s designed and restored buildings around the world, often for major corporation. He’s also crafted objects of interior design, and publicly mused upon the role of such endeavors on behavior and society itself. But he isn’t interviewed here—mostly we see him putter around as workmen lay a simple stone circle on the property outside his rural villa. We also visit the massive temple ruins of Baalbeck in Lebanon, an enormous quarry, and see the industrial process of turning stone into cement. Many of these images are hypnotic, the film speed often slowed down to a degree where the minute becomes monumental—though there are plenty of actual monuments, too.

At the end, a conversation between colleagues spells out some questions hovering around Architecton, such as “Why do we build ugly, boring buildings if we know how to build beautiful ones?” (Lucchi himself admits being “ashamed” of a skyscraper he’s currently building in Milan that “has no meaning. It doesn’t belong to nature.”) But mostly, like the filmmaker’s prior Aquarela and Gunda, this is a cryptic piece of observational poetry from which you’re free to take or invent your own truths. It’s best to just let Kossakovsky’s frequently stupendous visuals simply wash over you, their impact further enhanced by the musical score from Russian-French composer Evgueni Galperine. Architecton opens at Bay Area theaters on Fri/1, including SF’s Roxie, as well as the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission and Mountain View.

If you’d prefer not to be engulfed by weighty matters of civilization and its wrongs, there’s always CatVideoFest 2025. This latest edition of an annual showcase for kitty clips will also be playing the Roxie, Alamo Drafthouses, Elmwood, Rafael Film Center, and other venues nationwide as of Fri/1. I certainly like cats, through it turns out watching 73 minutes of their hijinks can feel very long, especially when so many sequences here are just a few seconds’ length. We see felines battle appliances, tipping objects off tables and shelves, making uninvited guest appearances on the athletic field, high AF on catnip, scratch DJ-ing, dallying with other creatures (dogs, rabbits, a swan, babies), demonstrating acrobatic abilities, striking contortionist resting positions, etc..

Among the more substantial segments, culled from sources around the globe, are the chronicle of a mange-crippled puss’ rehabilitation to health. There’s another short “documentary” about a rather crazy-acting woman who’s turned a Mongolian monastery into a cat refuge. Probably my favorite bit was the portrait of Cheddar, who “has an emotional support bikini that he takes everywhere,” dragging that hot-pink fashion item through life. I was less enamored of several amateur animations, and many cloying choices of musical background, which like much else here amplify the simple message “OMG SO CUTE!!!!” To each their own. When the need is urgent, I will probably stick with the alternative fare of goats balancing on unlikely things, as personified by this timeless viral classic. For listings on all CatVideoFest venues and dates, go here.

Back in the world of human folly, there are a couple new fiction features that chart very different paths towards terror. Cloud is the latest from Japanese writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for prior thrillers like Cure, Pulse and Creepy. Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) is a Tokyo resident who supplements his regular income by reselling things online—often buying on the cheap from floundering businesses, then listing on auction sites at a steep markup. It’s a somewhat shady business that must circumnavigate the law, as well as the occasional disgruntled customer.

When he quits his day job to pursue this side gig full-time, moving with girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) into a spacious, secluded rural home, things start going wrong. Is some sort of karmic justice being visited upon him for the merchants he’d taken advantage of and the collectors he’d traded dubious goods to? Or are those aggrieved parties simply taking the law into their own hands?

Unlike some of Kurosawa’s prior joints, Cloud does not turn out to have a supernatural element. But his usual spare, ominous atmospherics make it seem otherwise to a point—and by the time we grasp what’s really going on here, the action has grown so baroque, everyday reality still seems very far away. There’s commentary about the cross-section of greed, obsession and technology buried beneath a chilly gray surface here. But Cloud doesn’t moralize so much as simply spin a tale that spirals entertainingly from slow-burn suspense to bullet-riddled hysteria. It may not be entirely credible, but it doesn’t try to be—it develops a grotesque, ironic inner logic that carries the day.

A contrasting imaginative leap that results in a complete pratfall is The Home, which opened in theaters last Friday. SNL’s Pete Davidson plays a moderately rebellious adopted son from a respectable suburban family; he’s been in and out of trouble since a beloved older brother died some years prior. His latest offense (a political-protest mural) gets him sentenced to six months’ community service at Green Meadows Retirement Home, a sprawling facility in the countryside. Though on the low end of the staff totem pole as a janitor, he gets along well enough with various senior residents. However, it soon emerges that there’s the inevitable “something bad” going on beneath the surface, as hinted by screams coming from the locked 4th floor he’s forbidden to enter.

Yet another entry in the rapidly expanding annals of rest-home horror—a Swedish movie with a similar setting and the same exact title premiered at SXSW just four months ago—The Home eventually fumbles its overload of narrative “surprises” so completely, you might think it was penned by the inimitable M. Night Shyamalan. (Who has already contributed his own two cents to the gerontophobia subgenre, via the imaginatively titled Old.)

But instead it comes from James DeMonaco, whose Purge series did a variable but pretty good job overall of integrating political commentary (of a prescient governmental-fascism-critique nature) into conventional thriller mechanics. But this is an incredibly shoddy piece of work, such that you wonder “What happened?” Was the script unfinished when shooting began? Were there major problems on-set? Could nothing be fixed in the editing room? Lacking niceties of basic continuity, The Home is a hapless hot mess goosed to no avail by cheap jump scares and gratuitous gore. Likable Davidson doesn’t have the dramatic chops to unify such a mess, and everyone else emerges humiliated. How did a movie this wrecked get a wide theatrical release?

Such questions are more intriguing than the film itself, which will surely stand as one of the year’s worst… but not, alas, in a so-bad-it’s-good way.