Directed by: Andrey Bogatyrev
Written by: Pavel Abramov, Andrey Bogatyrev
Starring: Aleksei Shevchenkov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Yuriy Borisov
Release Date: December 10, 2020 (Russia)
Available on: Amazon Prime Video

I was flicking the other night through Amazon Prime in search of a sicko horror film from Korea, or something pretty and historical from China. Instead, I came across this Russian war film. The promise of a supernatural element caught my eye, and so I decided to give it a watch. My past experiences with Russian war films have been mostly disappointing. They often substitute crude jingoism for a coherent story and rely too much on cartoonish villains.

The film follows a group of Soviet partisans attempting to evade a ruthless German force. As said, the title, Red Ghost, suggested some sort of spectral presence, or at least something vaguely supernatural. Its product description certainly did. I found no such thing. Unless you count the fact that one of the characters is a comically good shot, there is nothing ghostly about Red Ghost. What it does have, however, is a decent plot, some good performances, and a general competence that is often lacking in the genre.

The characters are largely drawn from the standard war film stock: the hard-bitten partisan leader, the brutish German officer, the downtrodden but resilient civilians. But there are some interesting touches. Not all of the partisans are noble fighters. One of them is a hopeless drunk. Not all of the Germans are frothing monsters. One of them, indeed, is a thoroughly decent man. I found myself hoping he might survive, though this was, of course, a Russian film, and that was never going to happen.

A particular standout performance comes from Aleksei Shevchenkov as the titular Red Ghost. He plays his role with a calculating efficiency that keeps the film’s tension high. The German officer leading the pursuit is well-acted too, steering clear of the usual hysterical SS caricature. There’s a particularly well-executed scene in which the officer gives an exhausted but humane speech about how he, too, is just trying to survive. It’s a moment of depth in a film that otherwise deals mostly in brutal inevitabilities.

But that is all I have to say about the film. Watching it put me most in mind of the fact that something like the repeated horrors of the Russian Front are, even as I write, coming to their end in the Ukraine. War is a disgusting thing. It is a ritual in which young men, sometimes not older than me, are lied into killing each other without knowing each other – all in the service of old men as ugly as they are evil, who do know each other, and who sometimes get drunk together when the rotting bodies have been cleared away. As Croesus said to Cambyses, “οὐδεὶς γὰρ οὕτω ἀνόητος ἐστὶ ὅστις πόλεμον πρὸ εἰρήνης αἱρέεται· ἐν μὲν γὰρ τῇ οἱ παῖδες τοὺς πατέρας θάπτουσι, ἐν δὲ τῷ οἱ πατέρες τοὺς παῖδας.” (Herodotus, 1:87) But it is chosen again and again, and there has barely been a generation where fathers did not bury their sons.

And, since I have moved from the Second World War to the Ukraine War, I might as well continue. If there is a Final Judgement, I have no doubt that Boris Johnson will be flung into the hottest, bottommost pit of Hell. I am not absolving Mr Putin, who could and should have finished his Special Military Operation in days rather than years. Nor do I absolve the Zelensky Regime in Kiev, which should have stuck with its original intention of a polite surrender. But the chief villain in this war has been Boris Johnson. He it was who helped bring about the circumstances of the war. He it was who flew to Kiev and bullied and bribed the Zelensky Regime into fighting an unwinnable war, using every atrocity of the Russian Front to keep the conflict going. He it was who arranged the apparently lavish financial and military support by Western taxpayers.

He did this. So too did his ministers and their parasites. Some of these used to hang about the Libertarian Alliance before Dr Gabb was purged and blacklisted. Some of them even called themselves libertarians, and would mock him for his failure to sign up to every atom of the purist doctrine they claimed to guide their thoughts and lives. Well, these people may have grown rich since 2010. But, if there is an Invisible Friend up there, I hope he has them too in his book of the Hellbound.

But this is an aside. I should absolve Mr Johnson and his colleagues and parasites of the further sin of providing weapons systems that turned out to be useless and that revealed the growing bankruptcy of Western science and technology in the age of Net Zero and wishful thinking.

And, if he was instrumental in keeping this war going, and in seeing to the death of about a million young men on both sides, Boris Johnson was only the messenger. The real directors of this abomination were the monied interests in London and New York and their friends in the military-industrial complex. They really thought the end of the Cold War would let them create a global state in which they would sit at the top, sucking unearned wealth from the masses of the world. The recovery of Russia and the rise of China have challenged this evil fantasy. Therefore, the present war in Ukraine.

We need a revolution in Britain and America – not the switch from the more to the less insane wing of the ruling class that Donald Trump is fronting, but a revolution in which the existing ruling class is pulled down, exposed, tried, and punished. We then need to set about a reconstruction of our systems of government so that the bankers’ racket that is war is less likely to be repeated.

My present ambitions involve growing peacefully older, having sex with people almost as good-looking as I am. They do not involve being forced into a stiff and ill-fitting uniform to go out and kill strangers, ending as a stinking corpse or a variously damaged veteran of a war fought for reasons that will never be honestly explained.

So that is my review, for what it may be worth, of Red Ghost. Decent, but I prefer sicko horror from Korea. At least that keeps my mind off the sicko horror of the world about me.