Critics reviews

Glavonic is well aware of the responsibility that comes with representation, and, as death is precisely the cessation and absence of representation, with The Load he does what Loznitsa did in his 2012 WWII film In the Fog: he makes an exceptional war film that never once shows the atrocities of war, never tries to represent the unrepresentable.

This first fiction film by Ognjen Glavonic, who previously made the war-crime documentary Depth Two (2016), uses its streamlined premise not to ratchet up suspense but as a prelude to a slow-dawning reckoning in which implications of guilt and complicity take their time to sink in.

A film of modest means but grim force, The Load has that rare quality of dramatizing not the obvious evils of a conflict, but the torturous grey zone of how survival can implicate participation.

Glavonić’s approach here is so subtle and withholding that it might be possible for those not aware of this historical event to miss the full extent of the horror so obliquely outlined. It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story. . . . But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.