Atlantis (2019)

Directed by: Valentyn Vasyanovych | 106 minutes | drama, science fiction | Actors: Andriy Rymaruk, Liudmyla Bileka, Vasyl Antoniak, Aykhan Hajibayli

The world is sometimes a cold and lonely place. Especially for those who fly over a bombed-out city and see nothing but rubble, filth, abandoned factories and uninhabitable houses. But if you were to take a picture from above with a heat meter, you would see red-lit outlines between all that misery. That’s us, warm-blooded people, sheltering together.

This is what stays with you most about the Ukrainian feature film ‘Atlantis’. In this we meet Sergiy, a traumatized former soldier. After the end of the Russian-Ukrainian war, he finds a job as a worker in a steel factory in the destroyed city of Mariupol. When the factory closes, Sergiy continues as a driver, spending his free hours as a volunteer at the Black Tulip. This organization digs up corpses from war zones and returns them to the family or to a clean grave. And there he meets the archaeologist Katya.

‘Atlantis’ is a film you often see in art house films from the former Soviet Union. We see a society from which all joy of life has been banished and where traumas are drunk away, crushed or made love to a temporary ecstasy. All this also takes place in an extremely desolate place: the area around the Ukrainian Mariupol, with its destroyed houses, demolished factories, dredging, puddles and almost palpable cold. Throw in some traumatized people and you’ll be craving some vodka yourself.

That this does not happen is because of the warmth that love story gives us. But even more so because of the dazzling visuals. It is a miracle how director, screenwriter and DoP Valentyn Vasyanovych captures so much ugliness in so many beautiful images. Usually we look at stationary tableaux in which something unexpected happens suddenly. A shovel that performs a football trick with a rubber band. A monochrome gray landscape over which a factory barrel suddenly pours its flaming contents. The puny shadow of Sergiy facing the mighty, smoking factory.

You only notice how decisive those visuals are in the last half hour, when they become slightly less noticeable. Then we get bored with a much too long sex scene and we watch blankly as human remains are analysed. Only then do you realize that the strength of this film lies purely in beauty and comfort. Which is still more than enough.