V Tumane (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012)

In the Fog is a spartan exercise, with only as much character or historical background, or indeed plot, as is required to get its point across. It's set in a German-occupied Belarus in 1942, with a local man released by the Nazis after an act of sabotage and therefore immediately suspected by the community of collaboration, two of whom take it upon themselves to execute him in the woods. The woods form an amorphous and directionless stage for a story that feels very much like a play, accentuating the sense of the indifference of the universe to the characters' switching concerns, and the encroaching fog at the end has been there all along in the obfuscation that occurs in people's minds during a war where it's not taken as a given what an individual can do to remain morally in the right. The pace does get pretty funereal at times, but there is plenty of food for thought here nevertheless.

7/10