Klondike (2022) Review: War Through a Broken Wall

Is Klondike worth watching?

Yes, for viewers who can meet it on its own severe terms. Klondike is a controlled, deeply unsettling drama about the start of the war in eastern Ukraine, seen entirely from inside one damaged family home. Maryna Er Gorbach’s patient, fixed-camera style makes the violence feel both distant and inescapable, and Oksana Cherkashyna gives a formidable central performance. The reservation is that the same rigour can feel airless: the film’s deliberate stillness and schematic tensions will test anyone expecting a conventional war story.

What is Klondike about?

It is July 2014 in the Donbas, the region of eastern Ukraine on the Russian border. Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna), heavily pregnant, lives with her husband (Serhii Shadrin) in a farmhouse outside a village that is being taken over by armed separatist forces. An errant shell has left a gaping hole in the wall of their home, but Irka refuses to leave, even as her husband’s loyalties come under suspicion and her brother (Oleh Shcherbyna) arrives with a very different view of who is to blame.

Then, on 17 July 2014, the war becomes an international catastrophe: a passenger airliner is shot down over the region, and the wreckage of that disaster lands in the fields around the family.

Klondike is written and directed by Maryna Er Gorbach, a Ukrainian–Turkish co-production in Ukrainian that runs 100 minutes. It won the directing award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, and later took the Lotus Award for Best Film at the World Film Festival of Bangkok.

A war film that never leaves home

Er Gorbach’s key decision is to keep the camera with Irka and her house. Many shots are wide, long and still, observing the family from a distance as soldiers, neighbours and relatives drift in and out of frame. The approach turns the house into a stage for a whole country’s fracture: the hole in the wall becomes a window on a landscape that is steadily filling with threat.

That formal discipline makes the moments of violence land harder. They often happen at the edges of the image or off it altogether, so the audience experiences the war as Irka does, through sound, rumour and the sudden arrival of armed men. It is a brave approach, and the sense of domestic life being slowly strangled is unforgettable.

Oksana Cherkashyna holds the centre

In a film this still, the lead performance has to do much of the dramatic work, and Cherkashyna is superb. Her Irka is stubborn, practical and physically burdened, a woman whose refusal to leave is equal parts defiance, fear and exhaustion. She rarely explains herself, yet her silences make the stakes clear.

The men around her are sketched more broadly. The friction between Irka’s husband and her brother represents the political split of the region, and while it provides the film’s main conflict, it sometimes feels more like a debate staged for the audience than a relationship. Those scenes are where the film’s symbolism shows through most obviously.

Where the rigour becomes a limit

Klondike’s austerity is its strength, but it will not suit everyone. The pace is slow, character background is minimal, and the emotional register rarely lifts. Viewers without some knowledge of the 2014 conflict may find parts of the political tension hard to parse, since the film offers little context beyond what the characters say. It is an important film and a demanding one, and those two qualities are not always in balance.

Who should watch Klondike?

It is best suited to viewers drawn to serious festival cinema and to anyone who wants to understand the human cost of the war in Ukraine that began long before 2022. At 100 minutes it is compact, but emotionally heavy. Expect sudden violence, scenes of death and aftermath, and a distressing portrayal of pregnancy under siege.

Related war and drama titles:

• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, for similarly patient long takes across a bleak rural landscape.
• Nefes: Vatan Sağolsun, a Turkish war drama that also turns waiting under threat into its main source of tension.
• Ayla, a far more sentimental war story about a civilian child caught in conflict, for a contrasting approach.

The verdict

Klondike is a stark, formally confident drama that captures the moment a family’s home became a front line, and it deserves to be seen. Its stillness and symbolism can feel rigid, and its bleakness is unrelenting, but Cherkashyna’s performance and Er Gorbach’s control make it a film that lingers.

Rating: 3.5/5