Odessa

In their practical outdoor clothes, striding along through fresh green grass in bright sunlight, the trio at first look like hikers out for a day trip. The sky is blue, the mountain air fresh, the scenery enchanting. It is only as the boy (Tom Peper) and the woman (Magdalena Müller) begin to look tired and ask questions that it becomes apparent that something else is happening. When they reach a small church, the man (Bastian Beyer) suggests that they seek shelter there. The clergyman who opens the door is uncertain, so he speaks the magic word, ‘Odessa’, and soon they are welcomed in, fed and cared for.

They cannot remain, of course. It is just one station on their long journey, and it soon becomes apparent that they fear pursuit. Are they refugees? They are all three white, the woman with gold hair, the boy’s bright blond, and yet there was a time in the past century when people of all nations were criss-crossing Europe in desperate flight. The woman is afraid, but trying not to show it. She doesn’t want to frighten her son. As they stand on the shores of a narrow but angry river, his father comforts him by making a toy. He’s good with his hands and – as a quote at the start has prompted us to observe – good at understanding children’s needs. Although one gets the impression that there is love between them, his wife seems to be a bit of an afterthought.

It will be a rare viewer who feels no sympathy for this small family – and yet we know nothing about them. Director Harald Swinkels steers the film with consummate skill, every scene telling its own layered story. He is fully in control of audience reactions, even though revelation will come more swiftly to some than to others. Moments of bucolic peace can give way to terror in an instant, but it is a different kind of darkness, roiling beneath the surface, that threatens to swallow the unwary.

The vastness of the underlying story comes through in moments aligned with the vastness of the landscape; moments when we emerge from the cover of strees or houses and find ourselves up high amongst the peaks, able to gaze out at distant things. Swinkels has an eye for colours that direct the viewer’s gaze, telling stories of their own. In the final scene, when the man stands tall against the sky, surveying the path ahead, a great ridge dominates the horizon to his left, slices of rock protruding from it like the spines of a colossal stegosaurus. Something enormous has happened here. The full scale of it remains to be seen.

Odessa is on the longlist for the 2027 Oscars. It is a film of surpassing quality, and pertinent to our times. Catch it if you can.