Pamfir (2022)

There's a fight scene about an hour into Pamfir that I haven't been able to shake. Raw, chaotic, brilliantly staged. It arrives like a pressure valve finally giving way, and for a few minutes the film becomes genuinely electrifying. The problem is that everything leading up to it is so deliberately, painstakingly slow that by the time it lands, you might already have checked out. That tension, between a film that clearly has something to say and one that trusts its own atmosphere a little too much, is what makes Pamfir both worth recommending and worth qualifying in the same breath.

The setting does a lot of heavy lifting from the off. This is the Carpathian borderlands of western Ukraine, a region soaked in folk tradition, poverty, and the kind of grinding survival that doesn't make the news. You can feel the cold coming off the screen. Misty forests, dim village streets, close-ups so tight and unflinching they border on documentary. There's genuine texture here, a sense that the filmmaker knows this world and isn't dressing it up for outside consumption. That authenticity matters, and it's one of the film's real strengths.

At the centre of it all is Leonid, a former smuggler who's trying to go straight. He's come back to his family with good intentions and the weight of everything he used to be still sitting heavy on his shoulders. Serhii Filimonov plays him with a quiet, coiled intensity, and it's a performance that earns its keep even when the script asks very little of him for long stretches. You believe in this man. You believe in the pull between the life he wants and the life that keeps reaching back for him. That tension between fatherhood, tradition, and survival is the film's real subject, and when it's allowed to breathe it genuinely resonates.

But then there's the pacing. For the first hour, the film is all mood and very little momentum. Long walks. Meaningful glances. Simmering looks across rooms. It's deliberate, and I respect what it's going for, but deliberate and stagnant aren't always easy to tell apart when you're in the thick of it, and Pamfir crosses that line more than once. I found myself willing things to move, willing Leonid to make a choice or the world to force one on him, and the film kept asking me to wait a bit longer. Some viewers will settle into that rhythm without complaint. Others, myself included, will find patience tested.

When things do finally kick off, the contrast is almost jarring. That fight scene I mentioned isn't just viscerally exciting, it reframes everything that came before it. All that pent-up tension, all those simmering stares, it turns out the slow build was doing something after all. I'll give the film that. And the final stretch has a momentum and a bleakness that feel earned. It's just a shame the journey there is stretched thin enough to become a barrier rather than a foundation.

Culturally, this is rich stuff. The folk rituals woven through the story, particularly around the local carnival and its masks and costumes, add a layer of strangeness that stops the film from ever feeling entirely like a straightforward crime drama. There's something almost mythic trying to emerge, and sometimes it does. I've covered a fair bit of world cinema through my A-Z World Movie Tour, and Pamfir sits alongside films like Mustang in that category of regional European cinema that earns your attention through specificity and place, even when it doesn't quite nail the execution.

So where does that leave us? It's a good film. Genuinely good. Well-made, culturally specific, anchored by a performance that holds the whole thing together, and containing at least one sequence I'd call outstanding. But it's not a great film, not yet fully in control of its own rhythms, and a little too in love with its own atmosphere to always justify the time it asks of you. Worth watching, especially if slow-burn drama is your thing. Just go in with your eyes open.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-09-16

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Where to watch

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

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