‘Under the Volcano’ Review: A Ukrainian Family’s Vacation Turns Into Wartime Exile in Simmering Drama
“Why is there snow if it’s a volcano?” Fedir (Fedir Pugachov) throws out a seemingly innocent question to his family while wandering around Mount Teide in Spain. But it’s one of many that has become far more difficult to answer for his father Roman (Roman Lutskyi) and stepmother Nastya (Anastasiia Karpienko,) as the Ukrainian family’s holiday in the Canary Islands becomes a permanent trips amid the Russian invasion of their home country. Telling their six-year-old what’s falling upon them is burnt ash, and not snow, would be piercing an illusion they’d rather he hold onto — one of many in Damian Kocur’s cleverly conceived drama “Under the Volcano.”
At first, the greatest concern Roman and Nastya have is whether they’ll find a spot for their car near the beach on the last day of their vacation, having no idea that they’re about to be parked there indefinitely. Still, even before their teenage daughter Sofiia’s phone blows up the night before their flight home, there are indications that this hasn’t been a carefree week in paradise as Roman’s kids are still adjusting to his new wife. The preexisting tensions make news of the war more complicated to process; instead of coming together, the family begins to drift off into their own realms, with only Nastya feeling the responsibility to hold things down. Sofiia connects with a friend back in Kyiv and Roman tries to withdraw money from his bank accounts. Finances aren’t an immediate concern in terms of their stay in Recife when their hotel immediately offers a free room and food for as long as they need upon learning of the invasion, but they’ve got plenty of other anxieties as bits and pieces of news make their way to them.
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There is a suggestion early that “Under the Volcano” could be a dry Ruben Ostlund-style satire when a conga line can be seen dancing to “Guantanamera” around the family as they frantically check their phones for updates, but the irony is intended less for humor than to convey a world carrying on as a humanitarian tragedy unfolds. The point is made even clearer when Sofiia befriends Mike, an African immigrant who has eked out a living selling bracelets to tourists and can’t shake the memory of those who traveled with him to Spain and didn’t make it. One of the rare moments of levity is when he swears Brad Pitt was in “Titanic” when Sofiia knows it was Leonardo DiCaprio, but even that ends on a poignant note when all he’ll concede is that the two watched the same movie, but saw different things in it.
Of course, audiences are bound to have a different experience than the characters do in “Under the Volcano,” burdened by the knowledge that the war has yet not ended. That distance proves to be a double-edged sword. Although Kocur sticks the landing and doesn’t need to supply much context for the earliest moments of the family discovering what is going on back home, the uncertainty they feel threatens to become tedious around the mid-section when the film mainly follows Sofiia, who is at once the most connected to what’s going on and the most dismissive of it because of her chronically online disposition. She disassociates by filming videos, often of bikini-clad women her own age: a habit that borders on creepy and never entirely adds to the character or the plot. Yet if the film promises an eruption, it doesn’t disappoint when Sofiia is hardly the only one discontent as everyone questions their roles within the family when stuck at a standstill. It’s a notion that Kocur extends to current humanitarian crises in which we all have a stake, and the urge to do something is felt on screen and off.
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