Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis (2020) was a prize-winner in the Orrizonti section at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and Ukraine’s official selection for the 2020 Academy Award. Set in a bombed-out Ukraine of 2025, victorious in its war against Russia but left in societal, economic, and environmental ruins, the film’s crumbling world is barely distant enough to qualify as speculative fiction. Its references to current geopolitical realities are poignant, yet its focus is not so much on politics as on people and how they adjust to the aftereffects of the war, which at the time of the film’s production was localized in Ukraine’s southeastern industrial region of the Donbas. Showing little interest in either plot-development or individual stories, the film offers a grueling exploration of its characters’ internal worlds, touching on such subjects as PTSD, suicide, and the lingering war traumas. It produces a mesmerizing effect through a deliberately detached approach, zooming in on everything from desolate landscapes and detonated mines to decomposing corpses and small intimacies through a series of austerely shot tableaux with ruinous production design. This is easily one of the most original films of recent Ukrainian cinema, which rapidly assumes the responsibility for addressing even the most uncomfortable of war-related issues.