The Way Back

The act of walking can provide exercise, a time to reflect on the day, even a glimpse of the Great Outdoors. But for the characters in The Way Back, walking offers a grueling, potentially deadly path to freedom.

The film tells the purportedly true story of a group of prisoners who escaped from a WWII-era Siberian gulag, or work camp, and walked all the way to India, traveling some 4,000 miles. The action starts with Polish protagonist Janusz (Jim Sturgess) undergoing interrogation by the Soviets. The torture-induced testimony of his wife lands him in a gulag cutting trees in blinding snow and sub-zero temperatures. As one guard informs the inmates, Siberia is their prison. The deadly cold, miles of empty taiga and the well-known bounty on their heads all bar the convicts into a hellish world of slave labor and curtailed life expectancy. That is, until Janusz and a few acquaintances decide to make a run for it.

Their group is mostly made up of civilians on the wrong side of the Party, except for Valka (Colin Farrell), a deliciously off-kilter murderer with a beloved knife. This makes for some intriguing group dynamics—who should be the first to be eaten, if it comes to that? And Janusz asserts his leadership, mostly through a dogged insistence on putting one foot in front of the other.

Director Peter Weir excels at the development of environments. Audiences will come away with an intense gratitude for never living in the Soviet Union. Once outside, the breathtaking landscape cinematography takes command as the escapees venture, step by step, into ever more southerly environs. National Geographic Films had a hand in the production, for which viewers should also be grateful. The only aesthetic misstep comes in a clunky final montage.

The story moves at an appealingly meditative pace. After all, this is a film about people walking for months over thousands of miles, and after watching it, audiences may feel like they have experienced a journey, too. They run out of food, find food, sneak past Soviet villages, lose friends to the ferocious elements and more. This is no rapid-fire thriller; life here proceeds cyclically, as it should.

Accepting that, The Way Back serves as a satisfying and gorgeous depiction of the extremes of human perseverance. The trick, as Janusz puts it, is to “just keep walking.”