I haven’t a notion what the film was about. I can clutch at straws and make erroneous guesses. Gun to my temple – bye bye.

I oscillated between seething with rage and frustration at such a pretentious, nonsense piece of pomp.

And feeling my chest constrict with emotion.

I struggled with these two feelings throughout the film’s duration, and I wanted to shut it off 30mins in and rewind to the start as soon as it had ended. I did neither, opting instead to just rewatch some scenes.

If you’re going to show a lot of gorgeous scenery with a mother and a child, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If you’re going to show a mother who cannot protect her children from suffering, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If you’re going to show a child seeing that their mother is powerless to protect them, and their father is missing, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If you’re going to weave in grainy footage of doomed crowds and forlorn men marching knee deep in mud and water to war, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If your camera becomes an EYE, so you have to look into Terekhova’s face as you seek comfort as the child or try to reconnect with her as the wife, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If a young boy glares at his reflection in a mirror considering his miserable barefoot existence as his mother seeks pittance, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

If you have a scene where an old lady tells a boy to read a passage about Russia’s defense of the west, their lorn and hardened estrangement, and then have her vanish leaving only a fading water mark, of course it’s going to have an emotional impact.

If you're going to have a woman cut down with the words that her whole life is "a show of independence. If something doesn't suit you...you pretend it doesn't exist," of course it's going to have an emotional impact.

If you’re going to play the eerie, mournful, foreboding score by Eduard Artemiev whilst showing ominous scenes in black and white slow motion, of course it’s going to have some sort of emotional impact.

But if you’re going to take your beautiful film and chop it to all structural hell so that almost no scenes have context and you only feel the emotion either from what memories it evokes in your own past or because the camera is so personal and places you so directly within a scene, I am just going to be frustrated and bamboozled and incredibly envious of those who could see what I did not.

I most likely will have to give the film another go.