It's a harrowing movie and one you probably wouldn't want to see again
There are some movies you really ought to watch at least once in your lifetime, and some movies for which once is quite enough.
These films are seldom seen but unmissable, though what you witness might stay with you until the day you die.
Take the movie Come and See, for example, it's a WWII movie which depicts the Nazi occupation of Belarus through the eyes of a young teen who is subjected to horror after horror.
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The name of the film derives from a passage in the Book of Revelations which reads thusly: "And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!"
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
"And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
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Death and hell are certainly what you get with Come and See as the film doesn't shy away from the brutality of the Nazi occupation.
Throughout the movie there's barely a smidgen of anything beyond the unrepentant horrors of war.
Included in the movie is 'the most sickening 25-minute sequence from hell' where an entire village is slaughtered by the Nazis and the film's main character Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko) is forced to watch.
While the film is a harrowing experience it's considered cinematically important enough that movie fans think you should subject yourself to it at least once.
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The denizens of Letterboxd have it on their list of movies you really ought to watch at least once, even if you end up never wanting to see it again.
Other similarly harrowing films include the notorious nuclear war movie Threads, which has hardly ever been shown on TV but was just screened on BBC Four.
With a new audience seeing it for the first time and those who'd watched it before tuning in to check whether it really was as horrifying as they remember, plenty agreed that Threads didn't disappoint.
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Of course they probably aren't ever going to watch it again, there's only so much misery one can commit to screen before the audience needs a palette cleanser.
Those who saw Threads and Come and See and might be interested in another flavour of cinematic horror might want to seek out The War Game, which ended up being banned from being shown on TV.
Topics: TV and Film, Film
