Ashes in the Snow

Ashes in the Snow

The winter of our movie-going discontent is now. January is often referred to as a dumping ground for bad movies. “Ashes in the Snow,” directed by Marius A. Markevicius from a script by Ben York Jones (based on the young adult novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys), opens with a title card that has become my least favorite phrase: “Inspired By True Events.”

I dread those words because they tell me what they don’t mean, which is accountability. If you say something is “based on” truth or a true story, you’re at least trying to hold yourself responsible for something. If you say something is “inspired” by “events,” you want credibility and also to not be on any hooks.

What happened, historically speaking, was that during World War II the Soviet Union deported citizens of several Eastern European countries to hard labor camps in Siberia at certain points in the war years; for many people this meant death sentences. Russian prison camps and communities in Siberia go back to Czarist times; post-revolutionary Russian despots put new and crueler twists on them.

In “Ashes in the Snow,” we follow Lina (Bel Powley), a wonderfully wide-eyed Lithuanian girl who lives with her family in Lithuania. She’s an artistically inclined graphic designer who her mother Elena thinks doesn’t get out enough; but her good hearted father sees her as nothing short of inspired.

Their sunny family life the pre-arrest period glimpsed at film’s beginning and via flashback later is about the only time in Lina’s young existence when she stands beneath actual sunlight, until an arrest upends their existence and dad must be left behind while Lina, mom and others are packed into trains bound for eventually the Altai region.

There’s plenty here that feels familiar both formally and plot-wise: The ostensibly Lithuanian characters all speak English while the arresting and imprisoning soldiers bark in Russian. To underscore the horror of their situation, a baby dies on the train and a soldier won’t let them bury it. If anybody speaks out in a way that annoys a certain Russian, it’s over to the side, on your knees, bam, bullet to the back of the head.

The depictions of degradation and sadism are arguably accurate. But they’re staged in such an abstracted lack of context that one wonders if this movie is trafficking in human suffering.

I haven’t read Sepetys’ novel, but both script and direction (this is Jones’ first period picture; prior credits include contemporary dramas about similarly aged protagonists including “Like Crazy”) seem hellbent on making Lina and her predicament instantly “relatable,” so that her events unfold in what might as well be described as an alternate universe devised for their convenience: They’ve got genuine historical atrocities and catastrophes to work with here, but boil ’me down into another platitudinous testament to resilience of the human spirit.

We know nothing about Lina except her shyness before she winds up behind bars under duress from uniformed brutes who shoot people, then her defiance once she’s there; no sense of character depth at all, merely a sullen parable’s basic elements masquerading as personal history.

Watch Ashes in the Snow For Free On Gomovies.