Critics reviews

The director shows the managers of North Korea's special brand of post-truth messaging dutifully flattening and reshaping reality, but what makes Under the Sun one of the best films of the year is the way Mansky teases out, through lingering takes and a sense of humanistic surrealism, the numbing heartbreak behind the veil. No film in 2016 was more lucid on the dangers and possibilities of cinema.

Aside from a few explanatory captions, the film is opaque; it may not be the uplifting propaganda piece the government wanted, but it lacks enough perspective to reveal what life in North Korea is truly like.

Throughout SUN, Mansky cuts to shots of people in Pyongyang on their way to work or taking public transportation, the crowds moving in such an orderly fashion that they seem to have been choreographed. These are potent images of social control on a mass scale; the value of Mansky's film is that it allows one to understand how such a phenomenon feels on an individual level.

What makes these non-revelations draw blood is the sadness and simmering rage gathered at the margins of this Soviet-raised filmmaker's frame... Mansky communicates much within a limited terrain, but his master maneuver is to train his sights on a still-sincere little girl.

What became increasingly apparent to me as I watched Under the Sun, and as it continued to drift further and further away from something along the lines of what I'd imagined it would be, is that it is quite certainly one of the most bizarre and multivalent films I'd ever seen. While not showing you very much, it somehow shows you a great deal.

Hollywood has been yukking it up over North Korea and its comical-looking leader for some years now. There's nothing funny about either, and Mansky shows why.

Manskiy manages to fashion this material into an ominous indictment of the country's brainwashing tactics and absurd self-regard, mostly by just letting the camera roll. The insanity speaks for itself.

Like Nazi and Soviet propaganda films, "Under the Sun" offers a vision of social perfection that comes at the expense of messy truth and human complexity. Although unintentionally funny throughout, its evocation of life in a totalitarian society is ultimately chilling. The happy picture the North Koreans struggle to present implies unfathomable depths of violence to the human spirit beneath its glossy surface.

The movie raises disquieting questions, including a few that Mr. Mansky might not have meant to. I wonder whether his hijacking of the project has had consequences for the hapless and sympathetic Zin-mi. The film also got me thinking about cultural relativism and the ultimate meaning of human freedom. It touches a nerve substantially deeper than the "I'm sure glad I don't live there" one.

Shot on the great movie set that is North Korea, Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky's Under the Sun seems to have begun as an official "documentary" of an eight-year-old girl's entry into the Children's Union and ultimately became a documentary of that "documentary." Something like a behind the scenes look at a Potemkin Village, Mansky's deadpan depiction of orchestrated reality at certain times resembles The Truman Show, and others, a series of outtakes from Triumph of the Will.

For all its deep-cover subterfuge into the internal mechanics of state propaganda, Under the Sun offers little more than a cynical confirmation of conventional wisdom, content to disparage and disapprove, without digging into the darker corners of the disaster it explores.

The vision of such severe regimentation is shocking; Zin-mi's tears of shame and her sharply limited range of knowledge and inhibited behavior embody an outrage.