A nihilistic and mesmerizing vision of the hopelessly vengeful spiral of war, In the Fog takes place in Nazi-occupied Belarus and loosely centers around a cryptic woodsman guide suspected of collusion with the Germans and swiftly condemned to death by his Partisan friends. Opening with a devastating extended tracking shot revealing a Hieronymus Bosch-like scene of a Partisan camp centered around a public hanging of suspected traitors, In the Fog slowly builds to its unexpected climax as it travels through the primordial autumnal forest made alive through the shadows and dark sanguine colors invented by master cinematographer Oleg Mutu. Loznitsa’s adaptation of a novel by Belarusian writer Vasil Bykov leaves deliberately unexplained much of the background and events of In the Fog, plunging the viewer instead into the same confusion denied by the soldiers who stubbornly cling to the artificial romantic ideal of wartime heroism.