Blizzard of Souls (2019)

I'll be the first to admit: I'm not exactly a war movie obsessive. Give me Paths of Glory or Come and See and I'm in. Hand me your average WWII tankfest with too many close-ups of a Hollywood star yelling "Hold the line!" and I'll probably be asleep before the second act. And when it comes to WWI, well, let's just say I've never been desperate to watch another film about trench mud and doomed cavalry charges. So I went into this one, part of my A-Z World Movie Tour stopping off in Latvia, with cautious expectations and a readiness to be underwhelmed.

I wasn't. Not even close.

Blizzard of Souls, known in some territories as The Rifleman, is brutal, unflinching, and deeply personal. It doesn't glorify war so much as strip it down to its rawest elements: survival, loyalty, fear, and the slow erosion of innocence in a young man who had no business being on a battlefield in the first place. Based on a true story rooted in Latvian history, it follows Arturs, a stone-faced farmer's son who becomes one of the most feared snipers on the Eastern Front. His quiet determination and unwavering focus are chilling and compelling in equal measure. There's no swagger to him. Just cold resolve, and the creeping sense that something human is being lost with every shot fired.

What makes this stand out from the pack isn't just the imagery, though that imagery is something else entirely. Snow-covered forests. Stark winter skies the colour of dirty ice. The eerie, almost suffocating silence before a crack of a rifle splits the air. It's gorgeous in the bleakest possible way, and it reminded me in places of the desolate beauty I responded to in The Witch (2015), that same sense of a landscape that doesn't care whether you live or die. But what really sets this apart is the emotional restraint. There's no grand speechifying. No melodramatic deathbed soliloquies. No swelling strings telling you how to feel. Just men in the dirt, trying to survive another hour.

It's also a genuinely powerful piece of national cinema, and that dimension matters. Latvia is a small country caught historically between enormous, grinding empires, and the film is honest about that. These men are being pushed into a war that arguably wasn't theirs to fight, yet they fight anyway, and the film keeps asking, quietly but persistently: who are they really fighting for? What will be left when it's over? That tension pulses beneath every scene, and it gives the whole thing a weight that goes beyond the individual story. This isn't just one man's war. It's a country's reckoning with its own survival.

I'll be honest, it's not flawless. A few scenes feel slightly rushed, like the script was working through plot points rather than letting them breathe, and the final act loses a little momentum when it could do with tightening. These are real criticisms, not minor quibbles. But they don't sink the film, not even close. The core of it is so strong, and the lead performance so quietly devastating, that the rough edges feel beside the point by the time the credits roll.

As someone who usually needs his war films to lean firmly into the anti-war camp rather than the heroic glory end of the spectrum, this hit me right in the gut. It's firmly in that first category, though it earns its moments of grim pride. I think of it as being in the same conversation as 1917, another film that refuses to let war feel like entertainment, though Blizzard of Souls is quieter, less showy, and in some ways more affecting for it.

Four stars. A brilliant discovery from a country whose cinema I knew almost nothing about before this tour, and exactly the kind of film this project exists to find.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-07-08

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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