Parky At the Pictures (27/3/2026)

(Reviews of Two Prosecutors; Orwell: 2+2=5; Underland; Redoubt; and No Ordinary Heist)

TWO PROSECUTORS.

Such has been the provocative excellence of such documentaries as Maidan (2012), The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018), State Funeral (2019), Baba Yar, Context (2021), and The Kiev Trial (2022) that it's easy to forget that Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has also made such impactful fictional films as My Joy (2010), In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017), and Donbass (2018). Following a seven-year absence, he now returns to the dramatic format with Two Prosecutors, which equates events from the Stalinist era with those happening today in Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Some time in 1937, an elderly man on a work detail at the prison in Bryansk is given a single match for the stove and is ordered to burn hundreds of letters from prisoners asking Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for clemency. Among the notes is one from Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a longtime supporter of the Bolshevik cause, who was once an important figure in the Party hierarchy. The note is smuggled out and reaches Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a recently qualified prosecutor who feels dutybound to follow-up the request, as Stepniak had given a speech on `The Great Bolshevik Truth' at his law school and had inspired him with his passion for his vocation.

On arriving at the prison, Kornyev is taken through lots of locked doors and along numerous corridors before he reaches the office of the director (Andris Keišs), who tries to deter him from seeing Stepniak by claiming that he has a contagious disease. Undaunted, Kornyev insists on being taken to the governor (Vytautas Kaniušonis), who also comes up with excuses, as he claims overcrowding makes it impossible for Stepniak to be available. Holding his ground, Kornyev refuses to leave and is taken to the old man's cell.

After so long behind bars, Stepniak has become distrustful and insists on seeing Kornyev's accreditation before agreeing to meet him. He also demands that the guards wait outside and keep tabs on the interview through the Judas hole, as he is within his rights to have a private consultation. Kornyev confirms his assertion and the guards leave. Once they are alone, Stepniak shows Kornyev the bruise on his body and informs him that he and lots of other old Party loyalists are being tortured by the NKVD secret police. Kornyev is appalled by the brutality he has witnessed and promises to do what he can when Stepniak asks him to go to Moscow and request a meeting with Stalin or an important member of the Politburo because he is convinced that they have no idea that prisoners are being coerced into signing confessions that inevitably lead to their execution. As he has refused to sign anything, Stepniak has survived. But he knows he won't live much longer because of the internal damage caused by his punishments and he implores Kornyev to plead his case to prevent others from being subjected to the same injustice.

Some guards block Konyev's way, as he leaves he block, but he is allowed to pass, with the governor watching from his window. He orders Stepniak's death, while tutting about the fact that idiots are being allowed to graduate. On the train, Konyev finds himself sitting opposite a veteran of the Battle of Kowel (also Aleksandr Filippenko), who lost an arm and a leg in combating the Central Powers. The others in the compartment think he's an old windbag. But he gets their attention when he says he was told to visit Vladimir Ilych Lenin in Petrograd and ask him for alms. Venturing into Smolny, he searched for the Bolshevik leader with no luck. However, he refused to leave and eventually got to plead his cause with the man himself. With everyone listening raptly (apart from Konyev, who had dozed off), the old man explains that Lenin had promised him the best his sacrifice had entitled him to and he had lived in a state almshouse until Lenin's death in 1921. Now, he's on his way to Moscow to ask the same favour of Stalin, as he has heard he has a heart of gold. Prodding Kornyev with his wooden leg, he asks how he rates his chances. But the lawyer is asleep.

Arriving in Moscow, Kornyev heads for the office of Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Rather than queue at reception, he takes a chance and heads up a central flight of stairs. As no one stops him, he keeps going, although everyone stops when he helps a secretary recover the papers she's dropped. Given quizzical looks by uniformed figures and civilians alike, Kornyev shuffles along a corridor, where he is chided by an officious woman, who says anyone who has business with the Procurator General would know where to find him.

Having been greeted warmly on a landing by a man (Anton Lytvynov) claiming to be an old classmate, Kornyev makes his way through a heavy panelled door. He presents his credentials to a stiffly jobsworthy secretary (Nerijus Gadliauskas), who can't find his name on the list of appointments. When Kornyev explains that he has come a long way on a matter of national importance, he is told to take a seat in the packed waiting-room, on the off-chance that Vyshinsky will see him. After everyone else has left, the secretary tells Kornyev that he is very lucky because the Procurator General will see him.

Pausing at a conference table, Kornyev makes his way to Vyshinsky's desk and makes his report on what he had witnessed at Bryansk. He explains that he thinks the NKVD is out of control in the region and can't believe that the Kremlin would want such thuggery happening in its name. Sitting impassively, with his hands crossed on the desk, Vyshinsky examines the note that Stepniak had written with his own blood and asks Kornyev what steps he thinks he should take to prevent further cases. When he urges his superior to open an investigation, Vyshinsky confides that the NKVD currently operates under its own jurisdiction and that opening a case would be extremely difficult. However, he suggests that he returns to the prison to obtain medical proof of physical mistreatment, the Procurator General tells his secretary to give Kornyev a note confirming their meeting and a train ticket back to Bryansk.

Taken aback to discover Petya (Valentin Novopolskij) and Vasily (Dmitrij Denisiuk) already in his sleeping compartment, Kornyev joins them at the table for vodka and snacks. They are intrigued by his job and explain that they are engineers who are on their way to Bryansk to prevent an act of sabotage (although Vasily jokes that they are liquidators). They discuss whether someone can be guilty of a crime that has yet to be committed, but the mood changes when Petra asks the guard for a guitar and he plays Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Kornilov's `The Morning Greets Us With Coolness' from Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler's popular 1932 film, Counterplan. Kornyev smiles as they harmonise and Petra strums along, as he gets tipsy and wakes feeling the worse for wear next morning.

The engineers offer Kornyev a lift from the station and he gets embarrassed when Petya asks about local girls and whether they give it away easily. Taunting him for being a virgin, the pair sit calmly as the car turns away from Kornyev's lodgings and drives towards the prison. Vasily produces a warrant and informs the lawyer that he is under arrest and will be interrogated to see if he has a crime for which to answer. He pulls on the door handle, but realises he's trapped and curses himself for the folly of speaking out against the NKVD and for not understanding that its tactics were a nationwide strategy and not a local aberration. As the car drives through the creaking iron gates, they close ominously behind the rookie who had tried to do the right thing at the wrong time.

Marbled with a bleak humour that gnaws into the soul, this is a masterly piece of anti-establishment satire that has been adapted from a book by physicist and gulag survivor, Georgy Demidov, which was written in 1969 (but only published in 2009) and is is rooted in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Tsarist times (although there's plenty of Franz Kafka in there, too). Born in Belarus, but based in Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa has returned frequently to the Stalinist era and his understanding of totalitarian viciousness allows him to make cogent comparisons with what is happening in modern Russia. Indeed, it's hard not to equate Kornyev's naïveté with that of the subject of Daniel Roher's sobering profile, Navalny (2022).

The sense of menace extends from the corridors and cells of Bryansk through Vyshinsky's office to the train compartment, where it's no accident that the lyricist of the song the `liquidators' sing in the train (whose name is so similar to Kornyev's) also fell victim to the Great Purge in 1938. Yet Aleksandr Kuznetsov's little boy lost seems not to notice what is going on around him, even though he is warned by the old stager who despairs at seeing the ideals he had fought for being trampled by the thugs who have been drafted in by the Party to replace the revolutionaries whose beliefs no longer coincide with those of the dictatorship (`honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans'). Echoes of this cowardly abuse of power can be heard reverberating around our sorry world and it's obvious who is in Loznitsa's cross-hairs.

Admirable though Kuznetsov is, his character's Candide-like trust means he is always outshone, whether by Anatoliy Beliy's Vyshinsky, the cynically sociable prisoner escorts, or Aleksandr Filippenko in his exceptional dual display, as the beaten and bruised Stepniak and the tattered and torn Pegleg, who is just as deluded in his mission to Moscow as Kornyev. Ironically, the one man who speaks enthusiastically about him (albeit mistakenly) is ignored, when he might just have been able to teach the greenhorn a few rules of the very dangerous game he is playing.

Given that he spends so much time waiting in so many intimidating and dispiriting spaces (which are brilliantly designed by Jurij Grigorovič and Aldis Meinerts to suit the boxy aspect ratio, static gaze, and desaturated near-monochrome palette chosen by Romanian cinematographer, Oleg Mutu), it's perhaps not surprising that Kornyev acts impulsively, as he never knows when he might get another opportunity to state his case. But his poor judgement of character proves fatal, but who will care? His parents died years before and Stepniak will have joined them. Moreover, he's going to die a virgin, as he's regularly reminded throughout a fool's errand on which he is mournfully serenaded by Christiaan Verbeek's enveloping score. Surveying our shitshow of a world, it would be easy to believe that it's already too late for people to heed warnings like this. But the boorish buffoons currently wielding grotesque amounts of power won't be in charge for much longer. It's what happens after that that will determined humanity's future direction and we have to ensure that, unlike Kornyev, we don't get fooled again.

ORWELL: 2+2=5.

Born in Haiti, raised in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and educated in the USA, France, and West Germany Raoul Peck has several acclaimed films to his name, including Haitian Corner (1987), Lumumba (1990), and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), a profile of Black American writer James Baldwin that earned an Oscar nomination and César success. He also won a Peabody Award for the mini-series, Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), and now follows Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024) with Orwell:2+2=5, a study of George Orwell that takes its title from the 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In 1946, Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) went to the Scottish island of Jura to write what would be his last novel. A clip from John Glenister's The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (1983) shows Orwell (Ronald Pickup) sitting in the back of a car telling young son Richard that governments try to tell people that 2+2=5, when it should never be forgotten that the answer is four. Extracts from Michael Anderson's 1955 feature and Rudolph Cartier's 1954 live BBC production of 1984 follow, with Edmond O'Brien and Peter Cushing respectively playing Winston Smith. More curiously, a scene from David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) is used for Daniel Lewis's reading of Orwell's views on writing being a lonely child's way of fighting back. We also see clips from modern war zones with euphemistic terms applied to show how governments avoid speaking plainly when justifying military action.

A 1903 photo shows the infant Orwell with the Indian nanny whose name no one bothered to record, as he explains that it's important to know a writer's before judging him. Before he was 20, he had joined the colonial police in Burma and came to recognise the monstrous injustice of imperialism and the fact that those who imposed it would not be considered `gentlemen' back in Britain. Over footage of modern Myanmar, Orwell laments his behaviour during his five years in uniform, even though it taught him that the oppressed are always right when it comes to judging a situation and that art that isn't political doesn't deserve the name. Portraits of totalitarian leaders follow, as Orwell declares that such regimes despite the truth and strive to reshape the past to reinforce their control over the minds of their subjects.

We see Eddie Albert's Winston being taught the answer `five' in Paul Nickell's 1953 Studio One adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell claimed to have been born in to the `lower-upper-middle class' and he explains how so many went into colonial service to play at being gentlemen (as a clip from Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa strains to underline). He continued that Britain would be a cold, miserable little island in which everyone lived on herring and potatoes if we abjured the empire and a clip from David Wheatley's The Road to 1984 (1984) shows how the novel drew on what Orwell had witnessed during the short life that would be ended by tuberculosis in 1950. A comparison hanging scene is shown from Sergei Loznitsa's Baba Yar. Context  (2021) before we see clips from the storming of the Capitol and heard Donald Trump calling the perpetrators `good people'.Orwell claimed that a totalitarian state is actually a theocracy because the leader had to prove themselves infallible and that is what Trump has done in the US, by coining the notion of `fake news' and sticking to his own lies in the face of damning evidence because he knows his supporters have such blind allegiance that they will accept his word every time. While Orwell might have anticipated such strategising, Peck ignores others who had written along similar lines in the past, including numerous political philosophers from ancient times onwards. So, he is somewhat culpable of shaping his own truth to reinforce his claims for Orwell's prescience.

A clip of John Hurt in Michael Radford's 1984 (1984) is accompanied by Orwell's musings on leader's reinventing history to suit themselves. Photos showing victims of Joseph Stalin's purges are used to illustrate the point before Peck moves on to book banning. He utilises a flashy graphic to list the titles that have been banned historically and are currently being removed from American school libraries. An obvious clip from François Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) is shown, as is a scene from Ken Loach's Land and Freedom (1994) to accompany Orwell's writings on the Spanish Civil War, which reshaped his political consciousness (and his contempt for goosestep marching), while fighting with the International Brigade. The conflict also taught him the truth about atrocities and the need to examine them from both sides before reaching a verdict, as no one ever believes their group would stoop to them.

A clip from John Stephenson's Animal Farm (1993) underscores Orwell's contention that everything he wrote after 1937 was against totalitarianism, while Bill Douglas's My Way Home (1987) reflects the sour memories that Orwell had of his schooldays at Eton. This leads to a section on class that rather inevitably includes The Frost Report sketch with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett, as well as scenes from Ken Loach's Riff-Raff (1991) and Ted Clisby's Forty Minutes documentary, 1984 - Voices in a City. At 17, Orwell declared himself a socialist, but had little understanding of class, poverty, or revolution and had to go out and learn the hard way, as he would record in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). We see gluttony in action in John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm (1954) and breadline reality in Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016), as Orwell recalls feeling like a walking belly when hunger made eating the sole focus of his existence. Michael Moore is seen speaking in a clip from Robert Kane Pappas's Orwell Rolls in His Grave (2003), a documentary about the media's role in the decline of American democracy, and a snippet follows from Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth (2018) before Peck shows us beaming photos of Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Michael Dell,

and Elon Musk and graphs showing the wealth gap in the United States.

A genius quote follows from the essay, `England Your England', as Orwell mocks the parasitical ruling class in Britain for being unable to turn themselves into bandits (like American millionaires) and having no option than to descend into stupidity. From this to smart cameras and their ability to even recognise covered faces (what would Big Brother have given for such kit?) and a mention of AI begs the inclusion of Tom Cruise's mug from Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) and Amie Donald's dead-eyed stare in Gerard Johnstone's M3GAN (2022). A voice reports that the people developing such software are also involved in selling our data to advertisers and other organisations and we have sleepwalked into a system of surveillance that is terrifying in its all-pervasiveness. In an interview, Edward Snowden warns that information is being gathered to use against everyone who accesses the Internet or uses mobile phones and social media, which, echoes the alarm that Orwell had sounded in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) is filleted for a shot of the Information Transit Office, while we hear of the distaste with which Orwell agreed to work for the BBC during the war, when he could only take pride in the fact that he had made its propaganda slightly less nauseating. Shots from Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris's documentary short, Morning in the Streets (1959), illustrate the news that Orwell and wife Eileen adopted a son, Richard Horatio, only for Eileen to die in the spring of 1945. The love-making scene between John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton follows before Renée Falconetti appears at the stake in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as Orwell discusses heresy and the lack of courage people exhibit when it comes to voicing dissent. We then see Milan Kundera admitting in interview that he regretted his past criticisms of Orwell, as it was only when he read his essays that he realised how radical he was.

Lists of companies owned by Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Silvio Berlusconi, Vincent Bolloré, Michael Blomberg, and Globo Group scroll down, as Orwell discusses free speech and the monopolising of information. We here news presenters repeating phrases around the world that are written to elicit a set response from the viewer. Talking heads complain that the media and regimes are so in cahoots that it's hard to know the source of stories or opinions. They also trivialise stories so people stop taking them seriously and they pontificate on matters about which they know nothing. We hear Trump boasting about being the best president Black America has known since Abraham Lincoln and see Nigel Farrage and Jean-Marie Le Pen seeking to intimidate opponents in TV debates by bawling at them or insulting them. By turning people off politics, so fewer people vote, they get a tighter grip on power and the institutions that wield it.

Orwell had feared that the concept of objective truth was fading out of his world and we see Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tasking Mark Zuckerberg over his use of white supremacists as fact-checkers on Facebook, while Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa bemoans the `enshittification' of the Internet that has been allowed by the unregulated tech giants who are seeking to destroy truth for profit.

After these brilliant examples of how we need to operate to prevent liberties being eroded away, Peck juxtaposes newspaper headlines about migrants with archive footage of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels speechifying with clips of modern leaders being just as impassioned in their delivery. It's a cumbersome segment, even though it includes Orwell's description of the film Winston saw about a migrant boat being bombarded by a helicopter, sending a young child's spinning into the air. Yet, in the midst of it all, there's the damning shot of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute at an event following Trump's second swearing-in as president. Some things just can't be unseen, although he seems to have got away with it, even though he subsequently fell out with the Blotus.

As Orwell had stated that political language had been designed to make lies sound truthful and we see examples of newspeak and doublethink in multicoloured letters. This sits a bit awkwardly before bulletins about Orwell's fading health (and his romance with Sonia Brownell) before we cut into various screen versions of Julia's arrest in 1984 amidst mention of the Though Police. We learn about torture and humiliation being grand ways of removing a person's will and we see clips from the Kino Production Group's Bread (1934) and Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005). Shots of Winston declaring his love for Big Brother lead into Trump being adored by the convention crowd he would go on to reassure that he will have things so fixed in four years time that they won't have to vote. But Shoshana Zuboff urges humankind to stick together, as that way the surveillance capitalists can't win. Orwell had stated that `the proles' alone can bring down the Party, as it could never be destroyed from within and this gave him hope for the future. Let's hope he's right - after all he was about most things!

Co-producing with Alex Gibney, Raoul Peck has put a lot of thought and research into this demanding documentary. The blizzard of images has been capably assembled by Alexandra Strauss, who has to resort to Ronald Pickup from time to time, as the only known moving footage of Orwell showed him crossing a playing field at Eton in 1921. However, Damian Lewis makes an affecting job of voicing Orwell's observations, theories, and fears. Yet, while it's hard to disagree with Orwell and Peck on any of the points raised, this is never as poweful and provocative as it was clearly intended to be.

Part of the problem is that Peck has tried to pack too much into the two-hour running time. It's almost as if there are three films competing for space and none of them is entirely successful. The biographical segment skimps on detail and is so shredded that it fails to hang together, while the literary analysis is frustratingly tunnel-visioned in mentioning only Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The other four novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Coming Up For Air are wholly ignored, while the sources of read passages are unreferenced. Much more time is devoted to the laboured argument that Orwell predicted just about everything that is wrong with the world today, with his insights being illustrated with clips taken from films of his own works and other pictures that are tangentially related to the topics under discussion. The result is fussy, disjointed, and slipshod and, thus, it winds up being guilty of the same sleights-of-hand of which Peck accuses the modern-day plutocrats he namechecks with such disdain.

The reliance on films by Ken Loach to bolster Orwell's prose is infuriating, as not only are the clips lazily chosen, but Loach is far from being the only social realist director on the block and his more recent work has smacked of the very propagandising that Orwell had found so resistible while at the BBC. More imagination might also have been shown in selecting those current world leaders who fit the Peck profile, as he has gone for the most obvious targets without once alluding to Africa and only picking on Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Latin America also gets off lightly with a fleeting glimpse of Javier Milei, but there's no sign of the likes of Kim Jong Un, Alexander Lukashenko, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Peck is a fine film-maker and his intentions here could not be more noble. As a political thinker, Orwell was ahead of his time and his writing is as relevant today as it has ever been. But the claim he had Nostradamic powers when it comes to the likes of Putin and Trump places the documentary on shakier ground and the more Peck strains to make connections with the Oceanian motto - War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength' - the more truistic the argument feels. He leaves us with lots to think about (even if little of it is new), but the genius lies in Orwell's prose and it's disappointing that no one has come to the fore in our troubled times to assume his mantle, although Maria Ressa and Shoshana Zuboff have interesting things to say (albeit in found clips), while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez most certainly has his subversive spirit. Mark Zuckerberg's bemused face when she backs him into a corner is far and away the film's visual highlight.

UNDERLAND.

In 2019, director Rob Petit teamed with author Robert Macfarlane on Upstream, a short that charted the course of the River Dee in Scotland from its floodplain to its source in the Cairngorm Mountains. The pair have now reunited on Petit's debut feature, Underland, which has been adapted from Macfarlane's acclaimed tome, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, which was the thematic sequel to equally admired The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, which had concluded a trilogy that had started with Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places.

As narrator Sandra Hüller ponders humanity's fascination with the void, we see Fátima Tec Pool prepare to enter a cave through the trunk of an ancient ash tree, Bradley Garrett driving through the neon-lit streets of Las Vegas, and Mariangela Lisanti donning safety equipment prior to entering her underground research facility. The first of six chapters, `The Beckoning Void', takes us to a cenote sinkhole in the Yucatán peninsula, where archaeologist Fátima Tec Pool is seeking evidence of the Mayan civilisation who considered caves to be `Xibalba', or the entrance to the Underworld.

Trained as an archaeologist, Bradley Garrett became interested in urban exploration and focussed on subterranean spaces because they reveal so much about humankind and will last a lot longer than any structures jutting up into the sky. Particle physicist Mariangela Lisanti travels 2km down in a cage to her workplace in the SNOLAB research centre in Canada. She explains she was known as `Miss Why' by her grandmother, as she was forever asking questions until she got to the question to which no one alive knows the answer. She is engaged in the search for dark matter, which has never been detected and she wonders how she will eventually catch the ghost.

In `Seeing in the Dark', Fátima reminds us that her ancestors toured the cenotes using flaming torches. although she now has state of the art imaging equipment to find the cave paintings and other clues they left behind. Bradley is also seeking to preserve. while bringing to light the communities that lived underground, whether in the catacombs of Paris, nuclear bunkers in Britain, or in the Vegas storm drains, where graffiti daubs the walls and what appears to be trash offers insights into why and how people lived below the surface. Considering it makes up 85% of the total mass of the universe, it seems bizarre that dark matter has not been seen. But it can be detected in readings of gravitational impact and Mariangela works in scrupulously clean conditions in the hope of detecting evidence to confirm the theories. She marvels at the giant machines that have been constructed to capture the fleeing interaction between dark matter and the things of the known world and views each experiment as an exciting waiting game that could, one day, change the way we view everything.

Hüller explains in narration, how minutes and hours mean nothing down below, as things are measured in epochs and aeons. She explores the notion of dark time and how ice has trapped fragments of history that have waited centuries to be discovered.

In `The Crux', Fátima edges her way along a narrow passage and we hear news reports about people being trapped in caves. She wonders why the Mayans took on such journeys and wades through deep water while recalling the river that they believed had to be crossed to get to the afterlife. Down in the Vegas drain, Bradley beats a hasty retreat, as rainwater floods in the chambers. While he is in darkness, Mariangela sits in artificial light and laments the lack of sunshine and wonders whether her efforts will ever yield worthwhile results.

This takes us into `The Forbidden Tomb', as an unidentified figure in diving equipment picks up a skull, as Hüller reveals that the remains of 60 billion people can be found underground. Bradley enters an unnamed mine and says he often comes across places that have consciously been forgotten. He despairs of the fact that such places are now filled with junk that has been tossed down the shafts. But the Earth doesn't forget and it annoys him that humankind has `blasted its way through the periodic table' and removed so much treasure, only to return it as trash. Sending a drone into a shaft, he uses black light to pick out unmined uranium and Hüller rues the fact that the material that could power a city could also destroy it. As we seek to return toxic waste in sealed containers, she ponders why we are here and what we are doing to the planet we call home.

Moving into `The Sacred Chamber', we see Fátima and her team camp for the night, as the cave is too big to complete in a day. She dreams of herself and another figure falling until they are no longer moving downwards, but she has no idea what this recurring image means, as her underground dreams are always different to those in the overland. Next morning, they find handprints on a wall made with crushed charcoal and they are thrilled with the discovery so deep inside the cave. Meanwhile, Mariangela's experiment has returned `null' results and she shrugs off the disappointment because there are lots of other doors to open in the search. Down in the cave, Fátima holds her hand in the light so her shadow touches the walls. She feels time has collapsed to allow her to interact with her ancestors. As the find is so deep inside the cave, she concludes this must have been a place of ritual and is, therefore, sacred.

It's time for `The Ascent', as Mariangela admits that she has come to terms with the fact that dark matter might never be discovered in her lifetime. She hopes the finder is a little girl who kept bugging her grandmother while staring at the night sky. Bradley wonders what a future civilisation might make of the detritus that has been dumped in the depths. Nevertheless, he has hope that we care enough about future generations for our efforts now to ensure their safety in deep time. A montage follows of images from the journeys (and elsewhere) together with a speeded up sensation of retreat that brings us back to the ancient ash tree (with birds singing) and the graffiti-strewn storm drain entrance, with its overgrown environs. Life goes on.

Despite being reverentially reviewed in most quarters, Underland sadly seems destined to join Lois Patiñoasks's Samsara (2023) in a small group of wonderment-inspiring `experience' films whose message and visuals failed to live up to their billing. There's no denying that the film has been made with great skill and integrity. The likes of Darren Aronofsky, Lauren Greenwood, and André Singer don't serve as executive producers on projects unless they have something significant to say. But it's difficult to see what Macfarlane and Petit want us to take away from their collaboration, which is essentially a subterranean son et lumière show.

Ruben Woodin Dechamps's imagery is often striking, while Balázs Simon's special effects impart an ethereality that gives one pause for thought. But the passages spoken in an Americanised accent by Sandra Hüller are purpler than the densest amethyst and nowhere near as poignant as the thoughts shared by the three participants. Hannah Peel's score is similarly over-insistent and is far less effective than Joakim Sundström's immersive sound design, which often makes astute use of silence.

Clearly striving to meld the scientific and the poetic, the physical and the philosophical, Petit has shown himself to be an imaginative and resourceful director. Given some of the angles from which he records scenes in the cenote, it would be fascinating to see a `making of' featurette. But, while the subject matter is undeniably intriguing and the film's technical aspects have to be respected, its intellectual and emotional impacts are, frustratingly, more negligible.

REDOUBT,

Born in 1894, Karl-Göran Persson lived outside the Swedish village of Hörby in Skåne. A simple farmhand, he was something of an outsider, who was taunted by the young men who had once sought him to join their games. His life changed, however, when the neutral government issued a pamphlet in 1943 entitled, If the War Comes. Advising on the steps to be taken in case of an attack by the Soviet Union, the text so convinced Persson of the threat posed by the Red Army that he started turning his humble shack into a mighty fortress that could not only shelter himself and his neighbours, but also the Swedish king. Copenhagen-based film-maker John Skroog now tells the story in Redoubt, a monochrome chronicle of the construction of the Söderto Fortress, which still towers above the surrounding countryside as a masterpiece of brutalist architecture.

Following some quoted extracts from `War Is Coming', Karl-Göran Persson (Denis Lavant) tries to get his head around the contents while pacing around a field. Regarded by some as an eccentric, Persson is much loved by the local children, who watch transfixed as he puts a chicken to sleep by stroking its head. A small boy sits beside the bird after everyone else has gone home, imploring it to wake up.

A child's voice on the soundtrack opines that Persson enjoyed having the children watch him, as he worked on turning his home into a bunker. When not toiling for his neighbours on their farms, he would attend church services and sing the hymns with gusto. But he was happiest collecting all manner of scrap from wherever he could find it. We see him methodically stacking broken bits of metal, outmoded farm machinery, bicycle parts, discarded pots and pans, and barbed wire, because he could never know what might come in handy.

Hearing that a gang was pulling up some railway track, Persson cycles across country to claim them for himself. Watching with amusement, as he tries to load a rail on to his bike, one of the workers calls him `a persistent little bastard'. But they don't know the half of it. Once Persson's mind is set, there's no changing it and he finds unsuspected strength to haul the rails on to the first floor of his edifice. Burning the midnight oil, he strengthens the walls of his upper floor before practicing spelling out `War is coming' in Morse Code on a signal lamp.

Harvest time comes and Persson pitches hay into a baling machine, with the camera lingering on its many working parts. He uses his cash to buy more supplies, but he doesn't endear himself to everyone, as the owner of the nearby garage tells him off for picking up perfectly good metal items for his reinforcements. Undaunted, Persson pops a couple of worn tyres over his head and melts them down to make waterproofing for his roof.

A small boy remembers the day an eclipse turned everything dark and quiet. But the silence was soon shattered by Persson running into the village shouting, `War is coming!' Stefanos (Michalis Koutsogiannakis) hires him to help with the threshing in his barn and orders him to slow down because he's missing the wheat and they're bound to live for another 20 years anyone. He claims to be baffled by the redoubt. but Persson assures him that he'll be allowed inside if the balloon goes up.

When not playing blind man's buff with the kids, Persson is hard at work. He mixes cement in a large bowl and hauls it up to the upper storey, where he gets to enjoy the view and the silence, as he perches on the edge of the roof. When he helps out with the stubble burning in the fields, Persson is told by one of the women (Livia Millhagen) that he's doing the right thing by building his citadel. As they rest beside a campfire, one of the women tells the story of the 1666 flood in Falun and how the authorities acted too slowly to prevent the `year of disaster in Örslösa', as the August rain washed the bridge away and the villager couldn't return and starved when the lake froze and they were unable to fish.

The children start collecting wood and lug it into the forest to build a fort of their own. Soon after, Persson's pension comes through and he spends the lot on supplies to the redoubt and he no longer has to try and cut down his favourite tree with a long saw that requires him to run from one end to the other after each draw. As he purchases so much, with the help of the local shopkeeper, he gets to ride on the delivery truck and not only finishes off the roof planking and plastering the walls, but he also builds storage hole into the wall for each local family, as well as reserving one for the King of Sweden.

Time passes and, while repairing his shirt collar by lamplight, Persson recites lines from the leaflet so that he remembers exactly what to do in case of an emergency. At the village dance, the camera does a 360° turn around the room and we finally see Persson sat on the side of the stage playing an accordion with the band. Later in the evening, he is telling a couple of young girls about the essentials they should pack for the invasion when a couple of likely lads start baiting him. One sings a coarse song before they tease him by saying that King Gustav VI Adolf has heard of his enterprise and is keen to inspect it for himself. Hurrying home, Persson rolls out the best duvet on the bed and puts a cloth on the table. Hanging the monarch's portrait on the wall, he pulls on a pair of white gloves and mimes showing his VIP visitor around the room. He's interrupted, however, by the sound of the bully boys trying to break in. They smash the downstairs windows and make siren noises to goad Persson before strutting away.

Shaken by the incident and unnerved by the ease with which the thugs had breached his defences, Persson board up his windows and one of the children declares on the soundtrack that they saw less of him after that. On St Lucia's Day (13 December), a procession of children following a candle and singing hymns pauses beside the deep pit that Persson is digging. This emboldens them to return to the fortress to tempt him into playing and he makes them hold hands in a long line and rushes them through the snow and between the trees to try and detach the stragglers. When everyone has been dropped, Persson runs between the children and they giggle with delight.

Having taken an outdoor bath in a tiny tub with snow all around him, Persson attends the New Year dance and uses his watch to count down to the moment everyone standing on a chair can jump down and celebrate the arrival of January. Returning home, he watches the fireworks through a gap in the planking. Lying in bed, however, he hears the warning siren sound and leaps into action. although he stumbles about in his gas mask.

It proves to be a false alarm and no one witnesses Persson's panic. But he remains reclusive until the day a female motorist (Agnieszka Podsiadlik), whose car has broken down in the snow, knocks on the door hoping to use a phone. He invites her inside for coffee and explains that he can offer her shelter. She wonders how he copes inside without plants and he makes a mental note, while also confiding that he has a sister in Philadelphia. Impressed by the now giant bastion, the woman tells Persson about the men who had built the great Gothic cathedrals and urges him to take pride in what he has achieved. Always awkward in conversation, he explains that he had been motivated to be ready for an attack that has yet to come and he admits to being tired of waiting: `Time in here, the waiting, it locks me in place like a vi​ce. All I can do is wait. I want it to end!'

A final child reveals in voiceover that Persson disappeared one day and his property was auctioned. It was then that the tourists came - and they continue to visit Söderto Fortress. The vagueness of this summation typifies the film's approach to the dating of the action. Seemingly, the 1943 leaflet is the starting point, but it's never clear when the story moves into the 1950s (or possibly the 60s), as Denis Lavant never seems to age as Persson and neither do his neighbours (unless we're supposed to intuit that the lads who turn against him were once part of his devoted coterie). Ultimately, such details are immaterial, as this is not supposed to be a by-numbers biopic. But it should be stated that Persson died in 1975 and that the Swedish government advised citizens to think about the prospect of invasion by Russia in 2024. So, the film could not be more timely.

It started out as a short for an art installation in 2014 and Skoog worked on developing it into a feature with his brother, Aron, who also appeared in his 2019 docu-drama, Ridge. When production designer Søren Schwarzberg read the screenplay (which was co-written with Kettil Kasang), he became interested in recreating a unique structure that had no plans and his ingenuity and the doggedness of prop master Viktor Lindström, who toured southern Sweden collecting all types of junk, enabled Skoog to complete the decade-long project.

For all the excellence of the ensemble (who are not attributed character names in the closing credits), the focus falls predominantly on Denis Lavant, who now only had to learn to speak Swedish with a southern accent, but who also had to learn how to do all of the jobs Persson performs on screen. Skoog and Polish cinematographer Ita Zbroňiec-Zajt (using 35mm) often keep Lavant in isolation, whether he's schlepping along country lanes with his latest haul of scrap, proving a jack of all trades on site, or tapping a small hole into an egg so he can drink the contents. The farming scenes are shot with the same fascination and respect for the finesse and physicality of the handiwork, while the sequences depicting communal activity have a discrete charm that makes the yobbish assault on the redoubt all the more dismaying.

At one point, Skoog seems to pay tribute to Ingmar Bergman, by having the children skip across the horizon in much the same way as the Dance of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957). But the spirit of Werner Herzog circa Heart of Glass (1976) also pervades proceedings that are utterly compelling (and beautifully scored by Amina Hocine) and it seems apt that the prop built from scratch for the picture has now become an exhibit in its own right. Lots of questions remain unanswered, but the most pressing are what happened to the hen and did the little boy get his wish?

NO ORDINARY HEIST.

When not making commercials or working in television, Colin McIvor has director three features. You can't say he hasn't tried to mix things up, as Cup Cake (2010) was a romcom about a bungling baker who is rescued from loan sharks by a mysterious artist, while Zoo (2017) centred on a 12 year-old keeper's son who tries to protect a baby elephant named Buster from the Luftwaffe. Now, McIvor has turned to the infamous 2004 Northern Bank robbery for No Ordinary Heist.

Christmas is coming and Richard Murray (Eddie Marsan), the manager of the main branch of Northern Bank in Belfast, has no time for the Secret Santa because he has to decide on staff cuts that have been imposed from above. Security guard

Mags Fulton (Michelle Fairley) detests Murray and fears she is for the chop, as does vault worker Barry McKenna (Éanna Hardwicke), who is forever being ticked off for idling.

Murray arrives home to find wife, Celine (Eva Birthistle), moving clothes into the spare room because she's tired of being a housemate with a husband she only sees at weekend. When thugs burst into the house disguised as cops on Sunday evening, she blames Murray for landing her in this situation, but McKenna's mother, Bernie (Andrea Irvine), is also taken hostage, so that each man has something to lose if he doesn't co-operate with the heist planned for Monday 20 December. To make things trickier, however, the ringleader, Gravel (Patrick O'Kane), explains after the pair have stopped yelling at each other, they are responsible for the survival of the other's loved one.

As they drive in together from Murray's house, he accuses McKenna of being in cahoots with the thieves, which he denies and counters that Murray is biased against him because he's from West Belfast. They agree to go along with the plan to put cash out as rubbish for a contractor van to collect and not to put other staff in jeopardy. Arriving mid-morning, they attract raised eyebrows from Mags, while Murray's secretary, Tracy (Aislín McGuckin), is taken aback by his jittery behaviour, especially when he avoids a conference call with his Australian boss over the redundancies to answer a burner phone.

A montage, with a ticking clock on the soundtrack, shows Murray and McKenna trying to act normally during the day. But the latter is panicked when he gets a call from Tracksuit (J.B. Moore) informing him that his mother had used scissors from her sewing box to cut her ties in a bid to post a help note through the letterbox.

Warned that they are on thin ice, McKenna is told to gather £1 million for a drop off in the city centre and Gravel reminds him that how they get it past eagle-eyed Mags on the CCTV screens is their problem. As she also controls the access buttons on the automated locking system, they have to keep her thinking all is normal. But, as McKenna and Murray have a past history because of the former's IRA father, they argue in the vault and Mags comes down to check Murray is okay, after she sees him stumble backwards. Hiding a bag filled with £20 notes, they reassure her, even though Murray is being vague about the details of the rubbish vehicle that she wants to log in so she can check it's legit. She remains wary, however, especially when McKenna has to shoot upstairs to get a signal to receive phone instructions and Mags's deputy, Jim (Paddy Jenkins), shares her suspicions.

Meanwhile, Celine gets talking to her minder, Ladybird (Michèle Forbes), who lost her husband in the Troubles and has little sympathy with the bank manager's wife living in the lap of luxury. By contrast, Murray notices the strain beginning to tell on McKenna and he urges him to stay calm and not attract undue attention when he takes the Gaelic Athletic Association bag stuffed with cash upstairs. He also manages to make it look as though he is being Mr Bountiful when he tells the staff to leave early to do a bit of Christmas shopping. This enables McKenna to slip by the last locked gate after Jim had asked to see inside the GAA bag slung across his shoulder. But Murray is pacing his office while waiting for McKenna to make the drop to prove their good faith and he feels distracted when he reassures Mags that she will not lose her job. She returns to her screens and is less than impressed when Murray can't give her details of the rubbish collection vehicle.

Having seen phone photos of their loved ones at gunpoint, Murray and McKenna hurry to stuff three more boxes with cash. Jim comes down for details of the rubbish company and Murray has to stop him taking the chair they have put on top of the boxes for his shed because it's bank property and he saunters away cursing Murray for being a skinflint. Loading the boxes on to three trolleys full of bin bags, Murray and McKenna get through the first set of gates and are lucky that Mags and Jim are distracted when one trolley tips over on a loose floor plate and they don't see the pair shovelling bundles of banknotes as fast as they can.

At 7pm, the white van arrives and two men order Murray and McKenna to push the trolleys on to the ramp. Disturbed by some drunken women on a hen do, they insist on keeping McKenna and Murray wonders whether he's an insider after all. Sitting in his office reflecting on recent events, Murray dials 999, only for the burner phone to ring and for McKenna to inform him that the gang want another run in 20 minutes. He runs down to the vault and has to avoid Mags, who has seen a copy of the redundancy list and wants to talk to him. She catches up with him as McKenna emerges from the white van and Murray can only look at her pathetically, as she says nothing and strides away (as does a policewoman, who pauses at the end of the alley when she sees the van).

Gravel turns up to inform Murray that he can go back to his life, just as Celine realises she's been dumped in the woods to find her way back to the road. As she's picked up by a motorist who calls the police, Tracksuit cleans his fingerprints off the kitchen sink and kettle and warns Bernie that they will be watching to ensure she says nothing about her ordeal. Sitting in the vault, Murray and McKenna joke about what they have been through and how they'll each have plenty of spare time on their hands during the next football season. Mags watches them on her screen, still unaware that they and their loved ones have been through.

TV news reports explain the scale of the £26.5 million theft, while PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde is seen at a press conference outlining how Northern Bank plans to make the notes instantly obsolete by replacing them with new ones of a different colour and style. This prompts the gang to torch the loot and an old man sees burning notes floating outside his window. A closing caption reveals that no one has ever been charged with the heist, which turned out to be pointless, as the notes were just so much waste paper.

One of the drawbacks of basing a `fictional' film on `factual' events is that comparisons will always be made between what happens on screen and what actually transpired. Acknowledging the connection to the Northern Bank affair, director Colin McIvor and co-scenarist Aisling Corristine stick to the basic premise that two bank officials stole money to order while members of their families were being held hostage. The trial run with the bag and the loading of cages for collection as rubbish by a white box van correspond to the notorious 2004 robbery. But much of the rest would appear to be invention and not all of it hangs together.

Assistant manager Kevin McMullen and cash centre clerk Chris Ward were the key holders chosen by the gang to carry out the Donegall Square West heist. Clearly, Richard Murray and Barry McKenna have been modelled on the pair, but their relationship has been compromised by a past episode seemingly related to IRA activity that is not made clear in the script, as McIvor and Corristine were keen to focus on the human dynamics and not the political background involving The Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement (which was jeopardised by the Northern Bank raid when the PSNI openly accused the IRA of being behind the crime).

The screenplay hints at the tensions between the men from County Down and West Belfast and suggests that other employees knew that Murray was forever on McKenna's case. The fact that the pair would spend so much time together over the course of a busy day when Murray had an important deadline relating to redundancies would surely have struck certain staff members as peculiar. One should have been security guard Mags Fulton, who seems to miss an awful lot of crucial details for someone who is supposedly such a demon at her job. It doesn't strike her as odd that the most senior person at the bank would assist an obvious underling with ferrying rubbish from the vault to the loading bay. Nor does it seem to bother a stickler for detail that Murray fails to provide her with vehicle information for her logbook. She may have been distracted by the looming announcement of staff cuts or she may simply have been tired, as she and Jim appear to work inordinately long shifts (and without cover). Either way, it dissipates the suspense knowing that Mags is going to miss every red flag and alarm bell, while the one occasion that McKenna is put under any pressure when Jim asks him to open his bag, he's let off the hook by the convenient arrival of the workers leaving early after Murray told them all to go shopping (a decidedly odd and out-of-character decision that nobody seems to question).

It also feels unlikely that a senior manager from the Australian bank that owned Northern would waive the fact that Murray walks out on their conference call and never gets back to him. This part of the scenario makes him feel like Jerry Lundegaard trying to avoid the insurance assessor in Joel Coen's Fargo (1996). William H. Macy probably had a better grip on the Minnesotan accent than Eddie Marsan does on the Ulster brogue. But he and Éanna Hardwicke do extremely well in sketchily written roles that reduce Murray and McKenna to pawns being moved around a board rather than family men under intolerable duress. This might have been different had more attention been paid to their respective relationships with their wife and mother. Eva Birthistle has a particularly thankless task as Celine Murray, whose initial scene with her `housemate' is pure melodrama, while her exchange with her furious female minder makes little sense when the remainder of the action has been so meticulously (and misguidedly) stripped of political significance. Similarly, even though Karyn McMullan was left in Drumkeeragh Forest near Ballynahinch, no explanation is given as to why Celine was not held hostage at her home, while Bernie was, and why she would be released in such an out-of-the way place. Mrs McMullan was treated for hypothermia, which gives viewers an idea of how cold it must have been on 20 December 2004. Yet, the female beat cop who spots the white van while walking past the alley behind the bank is in shirt sleeves!

Instigated by the chillingly menacing Patrick O'Kane as the shadowy Gravel, the heist situation is compelling and McIvor generates a good deal of suspense by having editor John Walters cut between cramped close-ups and CCTV images to underline the circumstances in which Murray and McKenna are operating. The ticking clock motif in Phil Kieran's score is also intelligently used to remind the audience of the sense of peril. McIvor and cinematographer Damien Elliott also make effective use of confined spaces to reinforce the pair's predicament, although more might have been done to establish the bank's layout and the placement of CCTV camera, especially within the vault. Whether it happened or not, the spillage of bags from one of McKenna's trolleys is clumsily contrived in the context of the film, especially as the reasons for the security duo failing to notice are so feeble.

Given that this is a fictional account, it seems odd that McIvor has chosen to use footage of Chief Constable Hugh Orde's press conference, as that was a factual occurrence and the blurring of the lines feels specious. As does the closing caption, which fails to mention that charges have been brought against several people in relation to the heist, including Chris Ward, who was acquitted when the prosecution opted not to present any evidence. Either this is a film about the 2004 Northern Bank robbery or it isn't. The endless fudges suggest the makers never really made up their minds.