Eastern Ukraine 2025: The war with Russia already ended some time ago. Now the damage must be surveyed. It is devastating. What used to be a landscape of heavy industry has become a landscape of ruins. Some of the gigantic factories still seem to be running, but as if the machines were creatures in a trance, oblivious to what has happened around them. One traumatized man leaps into a furnace. His reaction appears only reasonable after Valentyn Vasyanovich’s film: ATLANTIS is highly stylised, yet unabashedly bleak. Most of the shots are frontal, almost tableau-like, reducing the few people still visible to extras in a post-human drama. Vasyanovich likes to arrange set pieces, like in the lengthy shot of the autopsy: the body is almost decomposed, yet one must still name and register every item that remains. Sometimes there is even some grim fun, like when a man stops in no man’s land to arrange for a surprising way to take a bath. But overall, this is an apocalyptic panorama by Ukrainian cinema’s most flamboyant artist.
