Reflection

Directed by Valentyn Vasyanovych

Running time: 2hr05 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Roman Lutskyi and Nika Myslytska in Reflection

Reflection is a film of patient, one-shot tableaux, generally equal in form and proportion, even as wildly different polarities of life and death pass through the otherwise consistent frame. In one long take, a teenager and her friends have a paintball party for her birthday, coloured blotches splattering the vast glass observation wall as her parents look on, before the birthday girl hammily mimes her death for their benefit. In another, a soldier caught in the still-raging Russo-Ukrainian War is horrifically tortured with kicks and punches and power tools, left to bleed as the grisly clean-up ensues. And in another, a bird flies directly into the picture window of a smart high-rise flat in Kyiv, killed instantly even as its spirit seems to leave a permanent ghost-stain on the glass.

One-man movie crew Valentyn Vasyanovych — he directed, produced, wrote, shot and edited Reflection solo — films these vignettes, and many others around them, with an unmoving, unflinching camera, from a distance that doesn’t seem discreet so much as unconstrained in its observation: life is challenged, negotiated and ended in these wide, still images, and we’re powerless to intervene. But so, for the most part, is our watchful, undemonstrative protagonist Serhiy (Roman Lutskyi), a lanky, mild-mannered surgeon who is tacitly shamed by his daughter’s macho military stepdad into enlisting in the war. It’s a bad move, as Vasyanovych goes on to illustrate with calm, gut-churning brutality. Soon, we see that Reflection’s measured procession of shots is charting a timeline of trauma: before, in progress and after.

Prior to directing his first feature Atlantis — which won top honors in Venice’s Orizzonti strand in 2019, cuing this well-deserved graduation to Competition for his second — Vasyanovych was best known as the cinematographer of Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s astonishing, unsubtitled Deaf school drama The Tribe, which already established his knack for complex, emotionally fraught visual storytelling with a minimum of camera movement or dialogue to propel us through the characters’ lives. Reflection never invites us directly into Serhiy’s head or heart, but it makes us experience his ordeal at his precise pace and point of view, and so we feel his same gradual chill of the soul. It’s the very definition of challenging — I only hope a UK distributor takes it on out of Venice — but there’s truth, beauty and real human damage in its hardness.

REFLECTION (2021) Written, shot and edited by Valentyn Vasyanovych

Selected for Competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival