Leaving Afghanistan (2019)

Leaving Afghanistan earns its power by refusing the easy heroics of war cinema and instead dropping you into the abrasive, lived-in reality of a retreat that feels as perilous as any advance. Pavel Lungin stages the action with a gritty immediacy—the dust, the noise, the confusion—so you don’t just watch combat, you feel the chaos pressing in, along with the moral compromises and betrayals that war seems to invite. Beneath the mission’s urgency is a heartwrenching sense of exhaustion and inevitability, as soldiers who thought they were going home discover that history has one more bill to collect. It’s not for viewers looking for clean victories or simple politics, but if you want a war drama that feels uncomfortably authentic and emotionally honest, this one hits hard.

Leaving Afghanistan is clearly aiming for a gritty, boots-on-the-ground look at the Soviet withdrawal, using a high-stakes rescue mission to show how messy and morally complicated war can get. The problem is that Pavel Lungin tells it in an elliptical, jumpy way that can leave you scrambling to connect scenes and motivations, so the tension doesn’t always land as cleanly as it should. If you want a straightforward, tightly plotted war drama with clear geography and cause-and-effect, this may feel more frustrating than immersive. But if you’re open to a rough-edged, atmospheric film that prioritizes mood and the chaos of conflict over neat storytelling, there’s a stark intensity here that can still hit.