Intercepted is a simple but effective anti-war film

School rooms with broken windows, swing sets against bombed out apartment complexes, condos strewn with clothes and broken glass. Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted is built around the visuals of a Ukrainian landscape ravaged by war. In environments and landscapes mostly devoid of people, on the soundtrack we listen to the intercepted phone calls of Russian soldiers calling home from the front. In a documentary built on absence, we witness the ravages of war on a civilian population.

We see how landscapes hold onto the memories of violence, and how violence lingers. We sense through the intimate locations, particularly the interiors of homes and public buildings, the deep sense of uncertainty that carries through space. The scars of war don’t heal overnight, and with a country thrust in turmoil, the opportunities to rebuild remain scarce and often hopeless.

Sourced from calls posted online by the Ukrainian military, it’s obvious that these recordings are intended as a form of propaganda. Though real, they’ve been chosen and catered to amplify the inhumanity of its callers. Through the patient approach of the film, however, a deep melancholy emerges through the casual violence and disregard of the speakers. We hear echoes of conversations that mimic state-funded anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, but also a real and sincere sense of wavering entitlement and despair. The violence of war becomes poisonous to the spirit and morality of its perpetrators, who are themselves victims of a system that views them as disposable.

The soft hum of phone calls, the slight buzz and distortion amplifies a sense of complicity between the audience and the speakers. The soundscape intermixing the technological noise with the soft quietness of nature and isolation achieve a deepening sense of discomfort. The rhetoric expressed on the calls, wavering between pathetic and frightening, becomes increasingly familiar to the ideology expressed daily in the western world by politicians searching for scapegoats that turn people against each other.

Even as some of the soldiers question the war, the message from home often remains steadfast in defending the mission. The depth of certainty is rooted more in the distant homeland than on the ground, where battles are being fought. It’s a harsh look at the echoes of war, upheld more by ideology than reality. That isn’t to say that some of the concerns of Russian soldiers aren’t real; the continued evocation of America using Ukraine as a proxy or tool should be taken seriously. The shadows of American influence in global warfare can’t be understated. The specificity of the film’s expression of war is one that reverberates through most modern conflicts. Paranoia over American influence isn’t abstract, but extremely concrete.

The structure doesn’t lead the audience to any conclusion, removing any obvious narrative markers. It’s a documentary that moves forward through the soft momentum of drifting spaces and a vision of the Ukraine that is both sunkissed and ravaged. The beauty of the compositions and framing only exaggerate the ugliness they depict. We sense a deep rupture in lives interrupted and taken, and lands that will persist, forever changed.

Intercepted brings war down to a very human scale. It’s a film with a careful attention to aesthetics that challenges our perception of war in popular culture. Very simply and effectively, Karpovych’s direction is assured and un-romanticizes the aesthetics of violence in an impactful and effective way. ■

Intercepted (directed by Oksana Karpovych)

Intercepted opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Jan. 31.

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