This four-part debut feature from the Ukrainian writer-director Natalya Volorzhbit is an uneven but well-realized adaptation of her 2017 stage play.
The four tales told in “Bad Roads,” Natalya Volorzhbit’s bleak and unnerving first feature, add up to a startlingly grim panorama of life during wartime. We are in the battle-scarred Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, sometime after the spring of 2014, when tensions between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists flared into armed conflict, but long before the terrible escalations of the last few months.
The first unlucky traveler we meet is a middle-aged school principal driving through a security checkpoint. It’s a routine trek that quickly goes south when he can’t find his passport; his mild inebriation doesn’t help his case. As he pleads with two armed soldiers , you fear, not for the last time in this movie, that impatience will tilt into aggression and violence.
Does the principal really see what he thinks he sees? “Bad Roads,” which was Ukraine’s recent Oscar submission for international feature, suggests the question is irrelevant: Whatever’s happening in this particular instance, it speaks to the long-term trauma of an ongoing military presence and the malevolence that can seep, without warning, into everyday encounters.
The two middle stories in particular are marked by a certain staginess, a sense of visual abstraction, that points to the movie’s origins in Volorzhbit’s 2017 play, also titled “Bad Roads.” More convincingly inhabited is the film’s fourth and finest segment, in which a young woman accidentally runs over a chicken with her car and tries to compensate its owners, a poor older couple .
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