Chernobyl: Abyss

Chernobyl: Abyss, also titled Chernobyl 1986, is a 2021 Russian disaster film directed by and starring Danila Kozlovsky. The film centres on a fictionalised firefighter who becomes a liquidator during the Chernobyl disaster. The film was released in Russia by Central Partnership on 15 April 2021, and was subsequently picked up by Netflix in July 2021.
The soundtrack to the film was recorded by Alla Pugacheva.

Plot

The year is 1986, and 30-year old Pripyat firefighter Alexey Karpushin has begun to reconnect with a former lover, local hairdresser Olga Savostina. Olga reveals to him that he is the father of her 10-year-old son. Their growing romance falters when Alexey fails to turn up for a picnic with Olga and their son, and Olga tells him never to visit again. Alexey applies to be reassigned to Kyiv for a fresh start and is just about to leave when the explosion at the nearby Chernobyl power plant occurs, and instead, he boards a fire truck heading to reactor number 4.
Alexey survives the radiation exposure in the initial fight to control the fire. As the scale of the disaster becomes apparent, the potential for an even greater catastrophe is identified – a secondary steam explosion of a large water reservoir, which lies beneath the melting reactor, and that would eject enormous quantities of radioactive core material into the upper atmosphere, placing the European continent in danger. Alexey has experience of fire inspections on the corridors that lie underneath nuclear reactors. He is reluctant to volunteer for what will likely be a suicide mission, manually to drain the water reservoir before the reactor collapses into it. Alexey then learns that his son is suffering from radiation exposure and is at risk of dying. He agrees to join the team on the basis that his son will be sent to Switzerland for treatment.
After an unsuccessful first attempt, Alexey is convinced by his teammate Valera to make a second attempt to drain the water reservoir. During the successful second attempt, Valera is trapped but cuts the connecting rig for Alexey to escape without him. Alexey refuses to abandon Valera, and as the water is drained, the rescuers find Alexey in a severely irradiated state. He is reunited with Olga in the hospital who embraces him before he dies. Three months later, his son returns after his treatment in Switzerland.

Cast

Danila Kozlovsky as Alexey Karpushin, rescue worker and firefighter
Oksana Akinshina as Olga Savostina, a hairdresser
Filipp Avdeyev as Valery "Valera" Goncharuk, engineer
Ravshana Kurkova as Dina, a radiologist
as Colonel Boris Bobylin, a military diver
as Nikita
as Tropin
Artur Beschastnyy as Mikhail Stysin
as Tigran, firefighter
Dmitry Matveyev as Yura Kondratyuk, fireman Ura
Aleksandr Alyabyev as Ivan
Nikolay Samsonov as Kolya, a firefighter Nick
Pavel Davydov as Semen, liquidator
Nikita Karpinsky as Dmitry, firefighter

Production

, who had filmed the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, carried a "career-long ambition" to make a film on the events he witnessed. In 2015, on receiving a script for "Chernobyl 1986", Rodnyansky sent it to Danila Kozlovsky, who was then on the set of Vikings. Kozlovsky was initially dismissive but told the New York Times, that the more he read the script "the more I understood that this was an incredible event that influenced the history of our country, which is still a rather complex topic". Recognizing the impact of the 2019 television drama, Chernobyl and its detailed chronicle and exposure of the failings of the Soviet system, Rodnyansky and Kozlovsky instead sought to focus on the human story, particularly on the liquidators, whose individual heroism prevented the disaster escalating even further at great cost to them. The film was partly funded by the Russian State through the Cinema Foundation.

Release

The film was released in Russia on 15 April 2021 by Central Partnership. North American distribution rights were acquired by Capelight Pictures, and it was added to the Netflix platform in July 2021.

Reception

At its initial Russian release, Chris Brown in CBC News called the film a "missed opportunity", and that it "downplayed the misconduct and lies that Soviet authorities told in an effort to conceal the extent of the disaster". Reviewing its subsequent July release on Netflix, Mark Beaumont in the NME called the film: "a classic disaster movie; World Trade Center in scale and Titanic in execution", and forgave some of its fictionalized handling and lack of overt criticism of the Soviet system as saying "Hollywood has spent decades rewriting history – should we really chastise others for doing the same?". Valerie Hopkins in the New York Times wrote: "Whereas the HBO approach was to dissect systemic flaws in the Soviet system that led to the disaster, the Russian film does something familiar to the country’s cultural tradition: emphasizing the role of the individual, people’s personal heroism and dedication to a higher cause".