The Ascent

12/15/2024

This starts and finishes with the same shot - a freezing cold snowscape peppered with a few telegraph poles amidst a wilderness that the Soviet population were prepared to to die to protect from the invading Nazis. Two Red Army partisans are doing their best to frustrate their enemy whilst combating the brutality of the terrain and the climate. "Sotnikov" (Boris Plotnikov) and "Rybak" (Vladimir Gostyukhin) are out foraging for food when they encounter some sheep and then themselves become the hunted as a patrol chases them to a remote farmhouse and thence conveys them to a prison. It's here that these two men must face the truly evil police investigator "Portnov" (a spine-shivering contribution from Anatoly Solonitsyn) who tries to convince each man to tell what they know of their colleagu