‘Turn in the Wound’ Review: Abel Ferrara Interweaves Poetry and War in Mostly Successful Digital Doc
variety.comSiddhant Adlakha There’s a slim overlap in the Venn diagram of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Patti Smith. Into that nearly infinitesimal space fits Abel Ferrara’s obliquely reflective, geopolitical documentary “Turn in the Wound.” For that alone it deserves attention, though the Ukrainian president and the American poet/punk rocker aren’t Ferrara’s subjects so much as they are his featured co-authors — fellow painters of a portrait depicting the feeble but essential human instinct to chronicle the horrors of war.
Filled with shocking footage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with first-person recollections of atrocities, Ferrara’s unconventional film heavily features poetic performance art by Smith throughout its runtime.
It’s the glue that binds the film, until it no longer can. Languid despite its brevity, the movie occasionally loses its wider perspective beneath a one-track focus on individual lives.
Still, it maintains a magnetic allure for lengthy stretches, thanks to its use of noisy, low-rent digital video in both its recovered archival footage and its newly filmed interviews with Zelenskyy and various Ukrainian soldiers.
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