Representing Poland in the Oscars race, Damian Kocur’s film is not so much a story about the war in Ukraine as it is about social roles and the associated conflict of duties. ‘Under the Volcano’, superbly acted and directed, nevertheless remains an unfulfilling work, too safe and sterile to be deeply moving.
Kocur tells the story of a patchwork Ukrainian family holidaying in Tenerife. Forty-year-old Roma (Roman Lutskyi), his wife Nastia (Anastasia Karpenko), teenage Sofia (Sofiia Berezovska) and little Fedir (Fedir Pugachov) are just finishing their holiday. Just as they are about to fly to Kyiv, war breaks out. Stranded in a hotel on a paradise island, they must redefine the relationships that bind them and confront the questions of whether to return, where to return to, and finally, whether a man’s duty is to defend his homeland or to look after his family.
The plot is clearly reminiscent of the brilliant The Tourist by Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director who turned the story of a trip to the Alps into a psychodrama about family, social roles, masculinity, the right to cowardice and selfishness. Similar questions resound in Under the Volcano. Like the most sensitive of seismographs, Kocur’s camera begins to record the tremors that occur within the film family. This is because the news of the outbreak of war changes the dynamics of their relationship, creating new tensions that materialise in subsequent outbursts.
Kocur, who already proved in Bread and Salt that he is a master of building an unobvious atmosphere of danger, again registers the birth of aggression – seemingly invisible. It manifests itself in trivial moments: when Nastia pushes the teenage Sofia, who is afraid to jump from the high shore, into the water, or when Kocur films the colliding cars in the amusement park. The mounting tension is most clearly seen in the scenes with the Russian guests staying in the same hotel. The explosion is inevitable. After all, it is no coincidence that we find ourselves ‘under the volcano’ along with the characters.
Although we already knew about Kocur’s talent for directing non-professional actors, in Under the Volcano he shows again that he can precisely direct both children (the subtle role of Sofia Berezovska) and Spanish non-actors. But the first fiddle is played by Roman Lutskyi, known to Polish theatre fans as Hamlet from Maja Kleczewska’s production in Poznań. Although charismatic and extremely masculine, he cracks before our eyes. At first small, they widen by the minute. His Roma cracks from the inside, facing an impossible choice: to leave his family and go to the front with a gun or to forget his homeland and lead a comfortable life in the West. How to deal with the instilled sense of duty? And how will his nearest and dearest judge his eventual decision to ‘escape’?....
The young director poses extremely difficult and non-obvious questions in his film. At the same time, Under the Volcano disappoints, giving the impression of a film in which the social theme of migration and the refugee crisis is more important than the characters (it is no coincidence that the last shot is of an African refugee singing a song full of grief). Although filmed in Ukrainian, with Ukrainian actors, the film seems to have been created from borrowed emotions and heard stories. After all, the protagonist’s dilemmas were never the dilemmas of the director or his co-screenwriter Marta Konarzewska. This strangeness of the subject matter is felt on screen, as if we were watching the moving drama of Roma and Sofia through a pane of glass, from a safe distance. While the aforementioned Östlund performs a painful vivisection of himself in his films, Kocur serves us a sterile tale of other people’s experiences, noble but devoid of genuine emotion and authentic pain. And although there is no shortage of excellent scenes in Under the Volcano (a great conversation between Roma and her teenage daughter brings to mind Charlotte Wells’ brilliant Aftersun), and the actors, led by the phenomenal Lutskyi, play here without a false tone, Kocur’s film lacks the heat that would make us believe in the sincerity of this overly subtle and elegant story.
- ‘Under the Volcano’ (Polish title: Pod wulkanem), directed by Damian Kocur, Screenplay: Damian Kocur, Marta Konarzewska. Cinematography: Nikita Kuzmenko. Editing: Alan Zejer. Starring: Sofiia Berezovska, Anastasia Karpenko, Roman Lutskyi, Fedir Pugachov. Cinematic premiere: 11 October 2024.
