The Invasion
(Netherlands/France/USA, 145 min.)
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa
Before gaining new attention at film festivals with fiction titles such as In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017), and Donbass (2018), Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa started his career with documentaries. His feature debut The Settlement (2001), for example, captures the quotidian lives of ordinary people facing mental health struggles. The subjects convene in the peaceful countryside and find solace within an isolated farm.
Both Loznitsa’s style and his politics have evolved over these years. His recent fascination with archival footage interrogates the fallacies of Russian society. The Trial (2018), State Funeral (2019), and The Kiev Trial (2022) interrogate the systemic horrors of Soviet Russia, as the films weaponise their archive to contrast whirlwinds of hypocrisy both past and present.
It was therefore inevitable that a filmmakers with such political inklings as Loznitsa would cover the horrific events of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. In The Invasion (2024), the doc focuses on the daily lives of Ukrainian civilians through vignettes. The segments are notably brief, spending no more than ten minutes per subject. There are no chief protagonists at the forefront of Loznitsa’s episodic narrative. Instead, his footage of the Ukrainian populace avoids fetishising the devastation of the war. Footage from frontline military operations are notably absent from the greater picture.
Silence trumps over violence in Loznitsa’s sprawling chronology. The Invasion ebbs and flows through vibrant cityscapes, capturing brief moments of tragedy and levity within the quietude of the subjects’ surroundings. Funerals, weddings, physio-therapy sessions, and warm embraces are the focus here. Loznitsa’s affection towards collectivism and the soul of the Ukrainian people provide the film’s emotional resonance. The masses aren’t oblivious nor ignorant towards their catastrophic reality. Loznitsa never sugarcoats the gravity of their experiences, as the film includes harrowing scenes of locals mourning at neighbouring memorial sites. Some of the graves are dedicated to the lives of Ukrainian children who were massacred during the invasion.
The subjects find hope in their routines, as the vignettes spotlight their joy, humour, and resilience. Within Loznitsa’s portrait of Ukrainian society, empathy and tolerance is shared between family, friends, and strangers. The Invasion isn’t solely about the normalisation of war. It is a prolonged testimony on the power of communal resistance, as the film’s participants refuse to let their nation succumb to chaos.
The compassionate screen-treatment isn’t exclusive to the adult population. In one notable scene set in an elementary school, air-raid sirens force an entire student population to evacuate from their classrooms. The children maturely follow their teachers as they gather in a hidden bunker in the basement of their school. They chant songs and rhymes as they wait out the danger from above.
The Invasion shares a similar cinematographic method to The Settlement, as both films study the psychological space of the subjects’ locations. Whereas the former film utilises a foggy farmland as its narrative anchor, the latter is less specific. Some elements of his intentions with The Invasion are presumably empathetic, yet the storytelling is regrettably underwhelming. The chronology of the dispersed segments requires stronger segues to connect the different perspectives and subjects. The rhythm lacks a distinct motive and continuity.
The haphazard assembly clashes with the film’s questionable politics. Within the doc, Loznitsa captures the mourning of Azov brigade militants, an all-volunteer infantry unit notoriously known for harbouring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology. While the group has since become a pivotal part of Ukraine’s armed resistance against Russia, the xenophobic militia attacked members of the LGBTQ+ and Roma communities in 2018 and have been accused of war-crimes involving the rape and torturing of detainees in the Donbas region. Within the documentary, the militia is portrayed as the common man. Their graves are memorialised despite their hateful and illegal operations.
Ignorant to the group’s nationalist doctrine, or highly selective with his omissions, Loznitsa’s portrayal casually groups fascists with innocent dead children. The superficially a-political portrait undermines the humanist impact of the documentary’s portrait of daily life. As a form of cinéma vérité, The Invasion could be a compassionate call-to-arms, although the glaring contradictions found within its naïve military portrayal and messy vignette structure leave one feeling uneasy.
The Invasion is screening on the festival circuit.