“For those attuned to its rhythms, it will resonate as another chapter in Vasyanovych’s ongoing chronicle of war and aftermath.”

After Atlantis (2019), Valentyn Vasyanovych seemed poised as one of the most fascinating emerging directors in world cinema. That film, set in a speculative near future after a war between Russia and Ukraine, carried urgency, power, and vision. It also highlighted Vasyanovych’s strength of using extended shots with his austere and still camerawork while still capturing beautiful images.  His follow-up, Reflection, which premiered at Venice in 2021, felt slightly less focused, though still thematically ambitious. Now, with To the Victory!, which had its world premiere in the Platform section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (and has gone on to win the Platform Award), Vasyanovych continues his ongoing engagement with the war and its aftermath. And yet, despite its accolades, the film may prove more appealing to those with a direct, personal interest in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, as its overlength and dour pacing occasionally drift toward dullness.

The setting is in the future: one year after the war’s end. Ukraine is in decline with a population crisis, economic collapse, and lingering trauma. “October 26,” a radio announcer states, as we are told that more than twelve million Ukrainians live abroad, many with no intention of returning. The film presents this not as a backdrop but as the central condition of Ukraine, a country hollowed out, where absence is tangible.

Vasyanovych opens with a brilliant meta-trick. A father, Roman (played by Vasyanovych himself) and son (Hryhoriy Naumov) converse about the nature of cinema. “Why do you shoot on film?” the son asks. “Digital cannot produce the images that film does,” the father replies. We watch this set with the radio program describing the decline in postwar Ukraine, when suddenly the rug is pulled out from under us.  It was merely a scene for a film within the film. Few moments in recent cinema have caught me so off guard; I did not expect it, and I was stunned. Vasyanovych has always been concerned with cinema’s relation to truth and memory, and here he plays with it in a way that destabilizes everything that follows, very much how the war has destabilized Ukraine.

Much of To the Victory! focuses on disrupted families, fractured by war and its aftermath. Roman contemplates leaving for Austria, encouraged by his wife (Marianna Novikova) who already lives in Vienna with his daughter. She sees no future in Ukraine, but he resists. He must make movies in his own country, no matter how diminished. The film is heavy with Vasyanovych’s own autobiographical presence, as a director unwilling to abandon a homeland that is ravaged yet still remains his country. “If they all leave,” one character observes, “the country will become only a territory.”

The film lingers on cemeteries as symbols of both personal and national loss, mirroring the state of the country and of those affected by the war. Couples who already had issues before the war see them accelerated, while others find distance has rekindled affection and shows the power of their relationship. In one bravura sequence, a character separated from his wife debates reconciliation, only to stand before the camera and leap in apparent suicide – until once again it is revealed as a film stunt. Vasyanovych refuses easy catharsis, preferring to complicate every gesture with artifice and irony.

There are moments of piercing cultural reflection. “The only thing foreigners knew about Ukraine before was Chernobyl,” a character remarks, “and now the whole country is Chernobyl.” The line is devastating in its truth; identity reduced to catastrophe. Later, in a cinema, The Color of Pomegranates plays, echoing both cultural heritage and the persistence of art even amid ruin. These flourishes, like teaching the son to drive after he has been injured in an accident, speak to generational continuities and fractures, of what is passed down and what is lost by the war.

The personal seeps into the political. One character visits a family who have resettled in Spain. The distance is palpable, and the longing deepened by photographs that close the film.  The images ache with past memories and what cannot be recovered. Vasyanovych even references his own Atlantis explicitly, a self-reflexive gesture that folds his career into the film’s texture. The sense is of an ongoing cinematic project, each film not isolated but part of a broader meditation on Ukraine’s past, present, and imagined and possible futures.

And yet, despite all this richness, the film falters. It is overlong. Its rhythm, already austere, too often slips into lethargy. Scenes of stillness and emptiness, powerful in Atlantis, here sometimes feel repetitive. I found myself drifting, my attention waning, the film’s power diluted by its insistence on stretching every gesture. “Just don’t fall asleep or end up somewhere weird,” a character remarks at one point, and the line feels too on the nose.

Still, there is no denying Vasyanovych’s talent. Few filmmakers today so insistently confront the trauma of Ukraine and so directly weave the nation’s suffering into the fabric of cinema. To the Victory! may not achieve the focused cinematic beauty of Atlantis, but it remains a film of ambition, complexity, and cultural commentary. For those attuned to its rhythms, it will resonate as another chapter in Vasyanovych’s ongoing chronicle of war and aftermath.