Red Ghost

Red Ghost (Krasnyy prizrak, 2021) is Andrey Bogatyrev's war action film, available to watch online on iFILM. It's the tail end of December 1941, near Vyazma. A handful of Red Army men slip out of an encirclement and hole up in an abandoned, frost-bitten village just to catch their breath.

The breather doesn't come. A Wehrmacht punitive squad sets up nearby, and the enemy soldiers are plainly hunting someone. A rumor spreads through their ranks about a lone marksman who steps out of the snow from nowhere, picks them off one at a time, then vanishes again. They call him the Red Ghost and they fear him — while the Soviet soldiers brace to make their last stand alongside the legend.

Bogatyrev shoots something close to an Eastern Front western: snowbound wilderness instead of prairie, a frozen hamlet instead of a saloon, one avenger against the executioners. Aleksey Shevchenkov, Vladimir Gostyukhin and Yura Borisov hold the cramped siege without overplaying it. The film treats the myth of the unkillable partisan as a folk tale about hope when there's nothing left to hope for. Stream Red Ghost (2021) online on iFILM.