Bleak. That is the word that immediately comes to mind when watching Larisa Sheptiko’s The Ascent. The snowfields stretch into eternity with an equally monochrome sky above. Trees break up the landscape, their bare branches and thin trunks providing only an illusion of shelter. Across this canvas, the drama of the Eastern Front of World War II plays out in stunning black and white cinematography.
A small unit of Russian men starve and freeze in between skirmishes with the Germans. Two soldiers are sent to a nearby farmhouse to bring back food. One, Boris Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), is young and mild-mannered, a follower. The other, Nikolay Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), is more experienced and full of bluster. He puts on the air of a man who knows what he’s doing, who can get out of any situation. Their mission goes awry after a German ambush, leading to a brief respite in the home of a Russian woman and her children, then their eventual capture by the Nazis. Suddenly we are in a story that is more akin to a morality tale or fable than historical fiction. The stakes are no less than the future of these men’s eternal souls.
The setting of The Ascent feels as much like a state of limbo as much is it is a wintry Eastern Europe. This is a place where men and women are tested in the face of imminent death. Within this theatre, Sotnikov faces death and gains a transcendent perspective. He becomes a Christ-figure, able to love his comrades without clinging to his mortal life. He ascends to his own Golgotha, but also to a higher sense of peace. Rybak, meanwhile, is plagued by visions of his death-that-might-be. He clings desperately to survival, becoming the tale’s Judas, a man willing to betray his friends and his country if it means stretching out his life just a little longer. In the end, even death refuses him its rest.
And yet what may make Sheptiko’s film a true classic is how she does not let the fable or allegoristic qualities of The Ascent disembody it from the real suffering of war. Sotnikov’s wide-eyed acceptance of death and Rybak’s anguish are striking, but what captured me most on my recent viewing was the tragedy of the mother, Avgniya Demchikha (Lyudmila Polyakova), and her children. Demchikha reluctantly takes in two soldiers and hides them in her loft. She is arrested when they are found and ripped away from her children, who will surely starve in the unforgiving winter. She, like Sotnikov and Rybak, must face death, but with no greater allegorical symbolism. All she has is her alternating rage and pleas for mercy. She, too, is remembered by The Ascent.
Sheptiko has her eye on great spiritual ideas: of the drama of laying down one’s life for a cause or selfishly clinging to it, of the way war strips away civilization to reveal what is really in our hearts. But she does not forget the suffering of the elderly, the widows, or the children amidst this drama. It is all laid out for us to see, up until the final shots of telephone poles dotting the snow like Eastern Orthodox crosses, and a church glimpsed in the distance before it is obscured again by the blowing snow. — James Smoker (2026)
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