The reviews of this film are either 'this is an amazing horror film!' or 'this is total trash!' so I'll try and be a bit balanced... This is clearly an independent low budget horror film so it doesn't make sense to approach it the same as you would approach a slick Hollywood production or whatever, so it's necessary to keep the constraints of low budget production in consideration.
There are some nice set pieces in the film and it opens well with a fairly gripping wartime assault. There is some nice set dressing and generally it looks like a lot of effort went into these sequences, and I think this pays off.
The film later becomes a typical horror film of people running around in the woods getting killed off, which is a pretty safe go-to for low budget horror films, but with these other sequences preceding it, and also a visit to a castle headquarters, it helps to give the film a sense of a bigger scope, so I think that was smartly done.
Yes, the film does suffer from being a bit all over the place. The look of it could have maybe done with some more work to make it look visually interesting. Sometimes the colours just seemed off, and I guess that there were some stylistic attempts going on in post production. Sometimes the blues seemed really strong, like characters' costumes would have a really strong blue hue to them, or characters' eyes would be really blue. This wasn't terrible, just odd. But yes, a lot of the time, the colours seemed all over the place.
The same was true of the acting - it was very hit and miss. Some actors were a bit weak, some pretty decent, and some were a bit of both. I think this is very much a low budget film characteristic. It was maybe a bold decision to have all the German characters speaking in English, especially jarring when, for example, the Russian soldiers would be speaking in Russian or a Russian accent. Seeing German soldiers talking in English, some with regional accents, had me going 'huh?' at first.
The use of CG was really hit and miss too... It maybe would have benefited the film to use it more sparingly and more subtly. For example, the CG plane near the beginning of the film was nice and subtle rather than trying to be something of a visual spectacle (which you can only really pull off if you're a massive production house), but I think the filmmakers got a little carried away with the CG blood effects. A character was shot in the head yet the blood didn't seem to spray out (on the ground) until they'd fallen down dead. A little moment where 'blood' splatters on the camera lens was also really unnecessary - especially as the film didn't go for that 'documentary' handheld style. At another point, a tank seems to very randomly fall out of the sky on a character... I really wasn't sure what was going on with that. It was just really... random.
What had more impact for me were the ghostly children that appear later on... a simple use of costume / make up but lots more effective.
I thought there were some nice ideas in this film, and with better execution it could have had greater impact. People have talked about the direction, and I kind of agree that it could have had more presence. Some shots were just not quite working... A soldier approaching the main character near the beginning with a note for him to go see his superior, for example. The main character is mostly lost behind the shoulder of this other officer, and he's also casually crouching on his leg and it makes him look even more lost in the frame.
Sometimes things would be going on in frame that gave the impression that the tripod was just plonked and the cameraman pressed record - for example, a wide shot after a bunch of people have been maimed / killed where one of the characters is getting to his feet and then stumbling over to a tree just looked a bit ropey.
But overall, as a fan of indie films, I liked this one.
