Replete with peculiar ideas about the nightmare of modern conflict, especially in bleakly undefined, but vaguely former-Soviet territories, Armenian director Marat Sargsyan’s debut, which started its life in Venice Critics’ Week and just picked up a Special Mention in the Transilvania International Film Festival Competition, is a strange and not wholly successful mixture of confounding and compelling. But thanks to some truly original, very striking imagery and the vague sense that Sargsyan knows what he’s getting at, even if you don’t, if you’re willing to commit resources to the tense ground war between frustration and revelation, the latter just about wins out. 

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For one thing, the film’s genuinely magnificent opening tides you through the early longueurs: through an eerily unreal icy landscape, with the ridges of far-off mountain ranges sticking up like dinosaur bones, the camera picks its way through craggy glacial formations.

Continue reading ‘The Flood Won’t Come’ Is A Challengingly Distorted Image Of The Pitiless Purgatory Of War [Transilvania Review] at The Playlist.