Intercepted (2025)

The family members back in Russia often struck a false note of confidence to me, as if they somehow needed it to be true for it to be worth it. That much is quite understandable, at least to a point. Their righteous vitriol was often responded to by uneasy agreement from the soldier on the front lines, but most of the time, the conscripts seemed more than happy to disabuse those back in Russia about what was really going on. And I felt frustration that they couldn't adequately describe the atmosphere, leaning into the lurid parts to convey some of the effect. In these cases, it seems like one party on the line must believe it all to be true, whilst the other doesn't have that luxury anymore. This asymmetry was interesting to me: in only one case in Intercepted do they seem to be egging each other on. You also get a horrible feeling of complicity as a viewer because you almost start to hope that none of the Russians make it home alive, if only for the sake of the wives, daughters and mothers' sake, etc. as the soldiers will have such a shocking amount of psychological trauma and a huge grievance that they will have no outlet for. Let's just hope the West doesn't betray the Ukranians too so that both sides don't have coherent reasons nurse their grievances for years, huh?

Throughout the film, we hear Ukrainians dehumanized ethnically (as “khokhols”), economically (as “pigs” suckling off the teat of the West), sexually (as “faggots”), and ideologically (as “Banderites,” “Nazis,” and “fascists”). The Soviet relic of ideological invective is, in some ways, the most chilling for its subtlety: the invocation of hated beliefs, and their ascription to broad national and ethnic groups, as moral permission to dehumanize and kill, in a mixture that destabilizes Anglosphere perceptions of left-right political alignment.

[…]

Karpovych clearly intends to evoke our disgust at the Russian women encouraging their men. But [one] could imagine similar frontline-homefront dialogues, including dehumanization of the enemy as encouragement and catharsis, coming from many sides in many wars past and present.

— Eli Friedberg (Slant Magazine)

Karpovych crafts a war film in which the politics and mechanics of war supersede its depiction, and thus, its cinematic fetishization. If Truffaut’s adage of never having seen an “anti-war film” had thus far held true, the notion is now well and truly shattered.

— Siddhant Adlakha (IndieWire)

War isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.

— Manohla Dargis (The New York Times)