The title character of Jurgis Matulevičius’s grim and impressive feature-length debut appears only once and just barely. In the film’s uncompromising opening passage, recorded in one grueling continuous take and set during the Lietukis garage massacre of 1941, Isaac’s visage is shrouded in shadow and later beaten to a pulp by Lithuianian activist Andrius Gluosnis (Aleksas Kazanavičius). While Isaac is never seen again after that one brief, violent moment, his murder lingers throughout the narrative, both as an ongoing cold case conducted by Soviet police and as a specter who torments Andrius and the community of men and women still reeling from the Nazi occupation’s brutal impact.
As much of a ruminative ghost story as it is a bleak post-war noir thriller, Isaac seeks to grapple with how authoritarian regimes and mass genocide breed an unrelenting cycle of guilt, violence, and grief, even after they’re long gone. Adapting from the final novel by Antanas Škėmas, Matulevičius makes impressive use of the story’s haunted quality. He shoots in mostly unbroken Steadicam to embody the fluid, wandering motions of an apparition, incorporates a ghoulish, gloomy New Wave-inflected score, and blends monochromatic visuals with saturated ones to convey how the scars of the past can bleed open into the present, sometimes literally.
Following its harrowing prologue, Isaac skips to 1964, where Lithuania is now occupied by the Soviet Union, Andrius is a detective who monitors the corpses of crime victims on a daily basis, and his old friend Gerdas (Dainius Gavenonis), a successful and suave writer-director, attempts to dramatize the events of the 1941 massacre for his next film. Early in his production process, Gerdas draws suspicion from confrontational KGB officer Kazimieras (Martynas Nedzinskas), who believes Gerdas’ comprehensive knowledge of the massacre implicates him as a first-hand witness to the carnage. As Gerdas grows more exasperated by Kazimieras’ relentless interrogation, Andrius becomes consumed with paranoia about his direct participation in Isaac’s passing, prompting hallucinatory visions of dead bodies that leave him emotionally withdrawn and disconnected from his long-suffering wife Elena (Severija Janusauskaite). Both men experience what feels like an unsettling residue of the collective suffering that preceded them, with Gerdas being surveilled for recreating and exposing his country’s dark past and Andrius unraveling from the unresolved trauma burned into his psyche.
Isaac’s multifaceted layers of tension — between Gerdas and Andrius, the Holocaust and the Cold War, color and monochrome, Nazi Germany and the USSR — sets the film apart from the usual depressive historical drama fare, where wartime is painted with exhausting, oppressive images of bloodshed and terror. Here, Matulevičius resists indulging too heavily in that approach (at least, after that first sequence), extracting suspense from the fraught cultural transition during that time period instead of inundating us with unsanitized tragedy porn. His formal restraint works to the story’s advantage, revealing the lasting effects of human suffering with plain, stark simplicity. Those effects are conveyed brilliantly during one of Isaac’s most striking scenes in which Gerdas explains to an ambivalent extra that her appearing nude in his film is crucial to portraying this indecent, depraved chapter of history. The moment serves to illustrate not only how art can be a questionable proxy for overcoming and dissecting a real-life tragedy, but also how revisiting said tragedy from a cinematic standpoint can give it a new meaning and create some distance for those most affected by it. “The camera is the observer,” Gerdas says at one point, a statement that reads almost as a meta commentary on Matulevičius’ own ambitious endeavor in reconstructing this tumultuous phase of Lithuanian history.
As admirable as that ambition is, Isaac’s opaque cinematic canvas and resistance toward exposition makes the film a demanding watch. At times, I found myself getting lost in the heaps of details on display and struggling to piece together ones that were left to the imagination or not explained thoroughly enough. Long stretches in the beginning are particularly difficult to follow along, as they rush through character introductions and hastily establish the web of relationships between them, some of which go underdeveloped. Elena’s covert and unrequited attraction toward Gerdas, for example, is an intriguing and even tantalizing subplot that gets a few compelling and memorable teases, but it’s unfortunately left dangling by the end. Perhaps if Matulevičius shaded Isaac with just a little more definition, the film could have realized its dramatic potential to the fullest degree. Luckily, despite its occasional incoherence, Isaac has a strong enough command of atmosphere to get its fervent anti-war points across.
