"Drawn from Vasily Bykov's novella Sotnikov, it's the tense tale of two starving partisans crawling across the hostile snows of Belarus during the 1942 Nazi occupation. The film is outstanding not just for its ravishing aestheticism, bus its Dostoevsksian soul-wrestrling and gripping central performances."
Some say God died in the Napoleonic Wars, at Jena; some say Friedrich Nietzsche struck the final blow; some say God died int Auschwitz. Sometimes we make out on a stone or glass the image of the H-bomb, or smoke from napalm, an it hurts too much to face directly. The Ascent takes place in a fallen world where such portents are inescapable, but it is the unyielding presence of the Christ-effect that fascinates me most about the film. It won't go away, the sense of a divine spirit at the margins of the frame, despite the bleakness of the landscape, the torture, and the unbelief all around. It's a remnant like afterbirth, in a film where a child's smile is the only joy we glimpse.