Andrius Blazevicius’s How to Divorce During War operates in dual registers—an intimate marital drama unfolding within the shadow of geopolitical crisis. What distinguishes the film is not simply its blending of genres, but its refusal to treat war as spectacle. Instead, it renders it as pressure—constant, inescapable, and ultimately secondary to the quiet collapse of a relationship.
“War is ever-present, but the real devastation is internal.”
Blazevicius’s script is the film’s defining strength. It constructs a narrative in which the apparent foreground—the war—gradually recedes into atmosphere, while the emotional disintegration between its central couple emerges as the true site of conflict. This inversion gives the film its weight. The war looms, but it is the erosion of intimacy that wounds most deeply.
From its opening moments, something feels subtly off. The film invites us into the characters’ lives not through exposition, but through imbalance—glances that linger too long, conversations that feel unfinished. Narvydas Naujalis’s cinematography captures this with precision, framing bodies in shared space that nonetheless feel emotionally estranged. It’s a visual language of distance, not disconnection, and it holds the film together.
There is, however, a rare misstep. In an early car scene between Vytas and Marija, the decision to shoot from outside the vehicle results in heavy shadow obscuring the actors’ faces. Whether intentional or not, the effect undercuts the emotional clarity of a moment that depends on performance. It’s one of the few instances where form disrupts rather than enhances.
Those performances—particularly from Žygimante Elena Jakštaité and Marius Repsys—are exceptional. Both actors deliver work that is restrained yet deeply felt, capturing not just the rupture of a relationship, but the slow, accumulating fractures that make that rupture inevitable. The divorce is not presented as a singular event, but as the endpoint of something already broken.
“The divorce is not an event—it’s an inevitability the film has already lived through.”
What elevates the film is how it reframes personal conflict through political context. The Russian invasion of Ukraine does not simply introduce a secondary narrative—it reshapes the primary one. Private dissatisfaction is suddenly measured against public crisis, forcing the characters into a confrontation not just with each other, but with their own moral frameworks.
Blazevicius is particularly incisive in exploring the gap between belief and action. The film repeatedly exposes how quickly conviction collapses when it demands personal sacrifice. This is evident in the wife’s professional dilemma, as well as in the husband’s rationalizations—both of which reveal a network of contradictions beneath seemingly firm ethical positions.
“Blazevicius exposes the fragile line between moral conviction and personal comfort.”
The film’s most telling gesture comes through the mother, who initially offers refuge to a displaced Ukrainian family, only to later expel them over domestic frustrations. It’s a moment that encapsulates the film’s central thesis: compassion, while easily declared, is far more difficult to sustain.
Blazevicius directs with remarkable control. The pacing is deliberate but never inert, and the emotional tension remains steady throughout. Most importantly, he resists judgment. These characters are not shaped into moral lessons or symbols—they are allowed to exist in their contradictions, their failures, and their fleeting moments of clarity.
How to Divorce During War ultimately becomes a film about instability—of identity, of relationships, of belief. It suggests that both love and morality are less fixed than we imagine, shaped as much by circumstance as by conviction.
In that sense, Blazevicius delivers something more unsettling than a traditional anti-war film. He offers a portrait of people who believe in their own principles—until those principles demand something of them.
Related Reviews