previously published on Cineuropa
Kristijan Milić returns to the Pula Film Festival with one more genre piece, based on a novel by Josip Mlakić centred around the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. The filmmaker once again blends different genres into a smooth and consistent amalgam with The Wrath of God, which has just premiered in the Croatian competition of the national festival. As a genre piece with universal appeal, one could expect specialised festivals to book the film in the future, but it could also fare reasonably well in the regional theatrical distribution landscape.
Central Bosnia, the winter of 1993. Ilija (Ivo Krešić, glimpsed in Milić’s previous feature, Dead Fish), formerly a maths teacher, is now a miner in the Croatian forces fighting against the Bosnian ones. His war routine is broken when he hears the news that his brother Goran was killed in action in a village several kilometres behind enemy lines, without his death having any strategic significance for the struggle. Furthermore, there is no official record of the action, and Goran and his comrades received a cash payment in US dollars for their involvement.
With the help of his contact in the intelligence department Zoran (Marko Cindrić, in his third collaboration with Milić), Ilija sets off on a mission to uncover who sent his brother and his comrades to death and what for. The conspiracy he discovers leads all the way to Zagreb and the shady deals between both sides of the conflict, with military and political officials involved. Ilija's investigation threatens to turn into revenge…
The war, or at least its echoes, serve as a primary topic in Milić's films, but the filmmaker's approach is always different in terms of genre. His debut The Living and the Dead (2007) blended WWII and the 1990s war in a mix of war movie, mystery, fantasy and supernatural horror. The subsequent Number 55 (2014) told the true story of the Croatian War for Independence as a pure high-octane war-action movie, while Dead Fish (2017) was an Altman-esque account of post-war human destinies in a divided city. This time, the foundation of the war movie is converted into a thriller with its sub-genres, such as the crime procedural, the film noir and the 1970s-style paranoid conspiracy thriller.
As a director, Milić makes all the calculated, smart moves to keep the plot going and intriguing for the viewers throughout the 110 minutes of its runtime. The pacing is usually moderate, which gives the sense that the plot breathes, while the shifts in genres are underlined by shifts of styles. For instance, the colour palette of Mirko Pivčević’s cinematography moves from the greys and browns of the war landscape to more bluish tones more suitable for an urban noir, and the music by Andrija Milić turns from old school orchestration with some acoustic guitar highlights, to something more jazzy and progressive as the plot moves to a different genre.
The same level of meticulousness can be observed in Milić’s choice of actors from the ranks of those he knows and has previously directed. Ivo Krešić as a leading man in a genre piece might have seemed a risky idea before, but the actor seizes the opportunity to prove himself capable of such an endeavour. He gets a lot of help from Marko Cindrić who plays Zoran in a very grounded fashion, Slaven Knezović (also the producer of the film) who plays Ilija's benevolent commander, while for Domagoj Mrkonjić in the role of Ilija's closest buddy could be a career-starting performance.
In the end, The Wrath of God is a slightly retro but never outdated, fulfilling genre movie experience. This kind of rock-solid but never flashy genre piece has become more and more of an oddity today.