Vague Visages’ The Editorial Office review contains minor spoilers. Roman Bondarchuk’s 2024 movie features Dmytro Bahnenko, Zhanna Ozirna and Rimma Zyubina. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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What is the shape of independent Ukrainian cinema going to look like when the country emerges from war? The Berlinale has made concerted efforts to include films about Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 (though the festival’s comparative silence and prevarication over the genocide in Gaza means these actions ring hollow). Such productions about Ukraine are only occasionally defined by Ukrainians themselves, and they are often funded by EU financiers, though that’s to be expected at the moment, as a state engaged in full-scale war rarely has time or resources to allocate to filmmaking. 

Between funding coming from outside and the presence of films such as Sean Penn’s risible Superpower in 2023 and Abel Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound in 2024, there’s a risk of Ukrainian images being defined by bystanders seeking visual of trauma and victimhood (or perhaps totemic images of heroism and valor). These images risk flattening Ukrainians into simplistic people, existing not as individuals but as ciphers for film projection. A Ukrainian cinema defined by these paradigms is not a Ukrainian cinema at all.

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I hope the future of Ukrainian cinema looks like The Editorial Office. Roman Bondarchuk’s 2024 feature is an acidic, jet-black comedy that takes aim at the fourth estate of Ukraine and the endless black hole of misinformation, clickbait and sensationalism that the internet has forced upon us. What effect does the lowering of media literacy that comes with this misinformation have on people’s ability to survive?

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In The Editorial Office, Yura (Dmytro Bahnenko), a scientific researcher somewhere in southern Ukraine, searches for a supposedly extinct groundhog species with his colleague, Mykhailo (Oleksandr Shmal). Confirmation of its presence would tie the region into a Europe-wide network of protected natural spaces just six months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On the research trip, the two characters stumble upon an arson attack: Yura takes the photographic evidence to a local news site, which agrees to publish a piece. The following day, with no article published yet, the police raid Yura’s home and he loses his job, forcing him to take an offer at the said news site as a social media editor. What follows is a Kafka-esque descent into a labyrinth of obscene local politics, criminality and complicity.

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Most of The Editorial Office’s filming was completed before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the story rooted in reality. Bahnenko, making his acting debut, is a local reporter who covered a similar story in Khreson (many of Bondarchuk’s family members have a journalistic background). So, here is a director who understands how news is made, created and manipulated, particularly in the ideologically vacant, vampiric world of modern capitalism that Ukraine has had to contend with since the fall of communism and its independence (as well as the equally ideologically vacant form of journalism).

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Of course, the lingering spectre of war hangs over The Editorial Office’s characters like the sword of Damocles. Bondarchuk’s posits a disunified picture of Ukraine, one plagued by problems not dissimilar from the rest of post-socialist Eastern Europe and the wider democratic world: local corruption, environmental collapse, fake news. The publication Yura ends up working for stands in stark contrast to the first paper he visits — “The Truth of the Steppe” — housed in a brutalist Soviet-era office block and kept alive entirely by the persistence of its sole employee and editor (Aleksandr Gannochenko). But even the seemingly valiant paper, it is suggested, bends the truth occasionally to make ends meet, with the editor admitting that one front page splash was staged for a local politician. The more well-financed variation, however, is much more deeply enmeshed in local corruption, with journalists focusing on sensationalist (and entirely made-up) stories of suicidal crimes of passion and ribbon-cutting openings for gas lines that don’t exist.

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In this world, Yura is accidentally a reporter. He may have the scientific nous to sift fact from fable, but he lacks the edge to survive. Every time Yura uncovers a new strand of conspiracy between the paper, government and mafia, he loses even more agency and power until he’s eventually drowning. That The Editorial Office takes a sudden turn into ritualistic folk-horror in its final half-hour feels like an ostentatious choice that could have backfired. Yet Bondarchuk — with his calm, acerbic eye and steady pacing — has the shift land with a dark glint. Key to the film’s success is the steady, persistent pacing, which has the effect of creating a sense of perpetual, thudding dread, elevated each time Yura finds himself deeper in the hole.

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There’s also a great knack for staging scenes and blocking in positions which highlight the power dynamics, and how oblivious everyone is to each other. A funeral home shootout has characters take cover and hide, yet they’re entirely visible under a coffin, and a newspaper office tantrum is highlighted by the editor being always visible in his glass office. Elsewhere, a cryptocurrency guru (Joel Kenneth Rakos as Bob Trusk) enraptures Yura’s financially desperate mother (Rimma Zyubina), with Bondarchuk showcasing the businessman’s televangelical-style gatherings. The staging highlights the filmmaker’s satirical points but also serves to provide its own excellent visual gags. It’s easy to forget that The Editorial Office is genuinely funny at times.

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Bondarchuk’s assessment of modern Ukraine isn’t pretty, and the implicit suggestion is that too much effort spent on meaningless fluff leads to a distracted populace, weaker democracy/accountability and a greater susceptibility to attack. Divide and rule may be a classic dictatorial move, but the dictator doesn’t always have to be the one deploying it to profit. Sometimes, the populace will do it for you of their own free will.

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And this tricky imposition hits at an uncomfortable and multifaceted truth — that progress for Ukrainians is not a straight line. A post-war Ukraine may be temporarily united, but without a rooting out of reactionary forces, it will also be susceptible to manipulation by larger powers.

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With the figure of a groundhog, whose reappearance in The Editorial Office’s epilogue is as bitterly funny as anything else in the film, Bondarchuk places Yura in a darkened mirror version of the 1993 Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day. Without a viable media landscape, and without independent institutions capable of operating without fear of reprisals, Ukraine will be stuck in a groundhog day of its own, endlessly repeating the same cycle of misinformation and attack. Bondarchuk delivers that polemic with wit and grace.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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