Director Sergei Loznitsa follows up his brilliant 2010 film My Joy (played at DIFF ’10) with In the Fog, a movie that again explores a bleak and rural territory of what was the Soviet Union. The film is set during World War II, when Germany had control of USSR, and focuses on three characters — a rebel, a coward, and a person who is neither a rebel nor a coward but is mistaken for a rebel by the Germans and for a coward by the Russians. By delving into each of the three characters’ back-story, the movie explores how war (or in a wider context, oppression) forces people to make choices. The movie shows us just one scenario of an end-result of the different choices. Like My Joy, In the Fog is humorless and portrays hopelessness as a by-product of a land consumed by war. This film is more conventional and also more accessible than the experimental yet superior My Joy, but it carries many recognizable traits of the director — effective use of flashback, revisiting one location at two different times, strong and dark visuals, long takes, and an extremely cold countryside. After My Joy and In the Fog, let us hope the director completes his thematic trilogy!
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