Under the Volcano

Original title: Pod wulkanem

Directed by: Damian Kocur

Length: 105 min.

Country: Poland, Ukraine

Year: 2024

Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: an Ukrainan family is about to return from a vacation on Tenerife, in February 2022.

RATING: 4.5/5

REVIEW

Tenerife, an inhabited island, where people live their existence under an active volcano that could erupt any time. A perfect conceptual metaphor highlighted in the title of Damian Kocur's second feature film Under the Volcano, which encapsulates both the sense of entrapment and the sense of impending catastrophe that can be immediately perceived in the film, as soon as Fedir, the little boy of a family of four, on vacation on the spanish island, says that he is Ukrainan.

From the principle, Under the Volcano transpires in the area of the implicit: the only direct visual reference made to the invasion of Ukraine is through a purposefully oblique close-up of a television screen, and a few references to missiles and cities, occasionally opting to cut to a black screen, as if the film poses itself as a too limited form to properly convey the emotional trauma. This form of observational subtlety is adopted also in regard to the characters of the film, amongst which re-emerge past conflicts that are never explicited or present discrepancies that are purposefully irrational. The cast is really sensational, from Roman Lutski (known for his role in Reflection), Anastasia Karpenko (who sensationally portrayed a mother in How is Katia?), the newcomer Sofia Berezovska and the little Fedir Pugachov

Kocur's attention to social issues emerges with an utmost accuracy in multiple forms in the film, not only in relation to the main protagonists, but also to the persistent european racism - challenged here by Sofia, the older sister in the family - or the frustration of locals towards tourists, or even the (non) confrontation of a parallel family of russian tourists. The film estabilishes a set of parallels and contrasts in the relationships, the most topical being the friendship estabilished between Sofia and an african immigrant, which sets a vicinity between refugees regardless of ethnicity.

Nikita Kuzmenko's cinematography here adheres with the visual modes that Kocur has already adopted in Bread and Salt and that they continue employing here. The aesthetic potentials of the volcano, the refelctions in windows, the framing subtly builds a visual language that makes Under the Volcano stunning, again implicitly, without bloating itself.

Under the Volcano is not a loud, grand-scale film, but very refined on its own scale, which makes it genuinely one of the better central-east european films of 2024.