Blindazh (2021): In the Silence of the Earth, the War Still Breathes
Bleak, poetic, and deeply immersive, Blindazh (2021) is a psychological war thriller that crawls beneath the surface — literally and emotionally. Set almost entirely inside a cold, crumbling trench bunker (the titular “blindazh”) on a remote front line, the film trades spectacle for suffocating intimacy, becoming a story not about the battles we fight, but the silence that follows.
Directed with haunting restraint by Andrei Kovalenko, the film follows a small unit of Ukrainian soldiers trapped during an artillery siege — cut off from command, low on supplies, and surrounded by invisible enemies. As the days stretch into an unbearable limbo, discipline erodes, fear takes root, and the line between survival and surrender grows dangerously thin.
At the center is Sergeant Dmytro Kovach (played with aching realism by Oleg Moskal), a weathered leader trying to hold both his unit — and his own sanity — together. His performance is riveting: tough yet broken, calm but cracking, a man who knows too well that death is only a few feet above him.
The supporting cast, including Yurii Ivanchuk as the idealistic rookie and Denys Martynov as the cynical medic, form a tense, believable brotherhood of men bound not by glory, but by dirt, trauma, and whispered regrets.
There are no heroic charges here. No grand speeches. Just the sound of earth shifting above, of rats moving through supplies, of muffled explosions in the distance. The sound design is extraordinary — every creak and echo becomes a psychological threat.
What makes Blindazh stand out is its focus on emotional erosion. Flashbacks are spare but powerful, revealing glimpses of families left behind, promises broken, and dreams already buried. There’s an almost theatrical minimalism to the setting — a single lantern, a weathered journal, a discarded wedding ring — all relics of lives once lived.
The climax is not an action set piece, but a choice: to live with horror, or die with meaning.
Rating: 9.0/10 – Quietly devastating, claustrophobic, and emotionally unrelenting. Blindazh is war cinema at its most intimate and unflinching — a chamber piece of trauma, humanity, and the ghosts we carry beneath the battlefield.
