James Norton delivers really quite well here as the journalist who stumbles upon and exposes one of the worst atrocities of Stalin's Soviet regime. Deep amidst the poverty-stricken Steppe, he gradually becomes aware that the dissolution of the traditional small-holding style of family farm in favour of the creation of potentially more yielding grand scale operations is failing - and failing badly. Needless to say, this isn't news that the authorities wish to be conveyed to the wider world, and so his exploration becomes steadily more perilous. Fortunately, he has a degree of diplomatic status and he does try to be fair with his reporting. On the face of it, the plan had merits - greater space to exploit, centralised harvesting, centralised everything, basically. What went wrong? Well, those aspects of "Holodomor" as it became known aren't really explained so well here, so at times the lack of recorded fact leaves the historical elements frustratingly scantily dealt with. Still, the dramatic ones work well with Peter Sarsgaard on good form as is Vanessa Kirby and the clearly rather more objective approach to this tragedy taken by director Angieszka Holland presents us with the template of a catastrophe and let's us reach some conclusions about complicity of and/or the domination of a doctrine for ourselves rather potently. The effects and results are there, but the causes - well maybe that's not so straightforward than propagandists on either side might prefer us to think. It's largely filmed on location and that, paired with some intimate photography and a persuasive score from Antoni Lazarkiewicz, adds a richness to this story and delivers up a film that provokes thought and ought to stoke an interest in a famine that's probably little known of nowadays.
