Mother. In the Name of the Millions (2014) User Reviews

It is a film suitable for all ages, regardless of gender and time in your life!

[mishchenkoe · 10/10 · 30 October 2016]

I watched „Mother. In the Name of the Millions" at one of its premieres. It is a film suitable for all ages, regardless of gender and time in your life. It reveals perhaps the most important and universal human feelings, in particular, in terms of motherly feelings. It features perhaps the only situation in life when a choice is so obvious. A mother always would choose a child and be ready to give her life away for that child. The film is also insightful, rooted in life, serving a sort of a demonstration for the topic. Moreover, it has the quality that might touch your soul in such a way that you might feel that you live through events in the film along with its characters. I'd like to express sincere appreciation and my respect for the film director and acting talent for this moving picture! Watch the film to form your own opinion! I recommend this film to everyone.

In my opinion, this film is not doing the subject justice

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 3 March 2019]

"Mother. In the Name of the Millions" is a Ukrainian/Estonian co-production and a relatively long title for a fairly short film because this work by award-winning director and co-writer Slavik Bihun runs for only slightly over 20 minutes. This one was released back in 2014, so it has its 5th anniversary this year. I cannot say anything about the cast here really at all. Maybe film nerd from Eastern Europe are familiar with some of the names, but as this is even by the actress who plays the title character the only filmmaking credit to-date, I kinda doubt it. Anyway, here we have one of so many war-themed movies, or to be more precise WW2 movies. It is the story of a woman hiding a young man from the SS. That is the very basic plot. There are 2 or 3 subplots, but I shall not go into detail about these. They aren't too memorable either honestly. So I am overall disappointed by this film. It feels more like a documentary reenactment than an actual movie. This may have to do with the lack of spoken language. I assume the idea was to take this route so people from all parts of the world can watch the film without being in need of subtitles, for which the movie is probably simply too unknown. The cast list including names from all kinds of countries it seems implies that too. They most likely wanted a bigger target audience here, but things did not go well. Theey backfired instead. It is really a huge challenge to make film on a subject like this work only through sound effects and soundtracks when it comes to audio. We see a man talking in a way of panic on one occasions, but apart from that, there is hardly any talking going on. I don't think they made up for this self-inflicted lack of voices in other fields. Also brave that they did not go for a stereotypical happy ending, but the one they chose instead to me felt just for the sake of shocking the audience. I know I did not cry, weep or mourn anybody here. The film falls surprisingly flat emotionally. The rating here on imdb is far too high. Not a success. Watch something else instead.