Rotation (2026)
I always want to meet a film like this halfway, and I tried hard with Rotation, Maryna Er Gorbach's experimental short film, which I caught at the BFI London Film Festival. Gorbach made the quietly devastating Klondike a few years ago, so there is real pedigree here, and the subject could hardly be more urgent. In the end, though, I admired it more than I connected with it, and I have to be honest and give it two stars.
The film follows a young Ukrainian woman who has moved from civilian life into military service, and who is using a kind of therapeutic hypnosis and meditation to steady herself while she is on leave from the frontlines. It is a genuinely interesting idea, the inner life of a soldier trying to reassemble herself between rotations, and the premise alone carries a quiet weight. The seriousness of what it is reaching for is never in doubt.
Formally it is the boldest thing I saw in the programme. It looks as though it was shot on older film stock, all soft grain and faded, dreamlike colour, though it may well be a camera trick, and that haziness does a lot to put you inside a mind that is somewhere between waking and trance. There is very little dialogue, and the film trusts image and texture to carry almost everything, which is a brave and legitimate choice for a piece this short.
My problem is that the experiment stayed on the surface for me. I kept waiting to be let further in, to feel the specific weight of this woman's experience rather than a beautifully rendered impression of it, and that deeper access never quite came. The restraint that gives the film its hypnotic quality also kept me at arm's length, and by the end I wanted it to have gone somewhere more searching and more in depth than it did.
Two stars, and said with respect for both the film-maker and the gravity of what she is documenting. Rotation is atmospheric, sincere and formally adventurous, and I suspect viewers more attuned to this kind of elliptical, mood-led work will take a great deal more from it than I managed to. For me it remained a striking surface in search of the depth its subject so clearly deserves.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Ukraine: Pamfir (2022), Police Story 4: First Strike (1996), The Tribe (2014)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: I Will Be Alright (2026), Delisted (2026), Lady (2026)
