Victor Kossakovsky’s “Architecton”
Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald
I watched this film because my wife wanted to watch a documentary. I knew nothing about it other than the cryptic blurb on HBO:
“A hypnotic, propulsive odyssey through the foundations of the modern world—concrete and stone—questioning how we might inhabit the world of tomorrow.”
That’s a bit of an overstatement, like the blurb for a new novel written by a friend of the author. The only word I really take issue with, however, is “inhabit.” A better choice might have been “create,” given the film’s focus on building.
The film opens with a rock-steady, drone-based, high-definition tour through devastated and abandoned apartment buildings, presumably somewhere in Ukraine. It’s an extended sequence that allows us to see—and experience—how modern, human-created structures are so easily destroyed. The remainder of the film presents one arresting image after another: rock, stone, gravel, ruins, arches, and modern concrete-based structures.
A unifying theme among the astonishing visuals and hypnotic music and sound—at one point the viewer is surrounded by the cracking and clicking of a tumbling stone avalanche—is an elderly architect supervising the construction of a “simple” circle of stone in his garden. Snow falls (we hear the snow!), chilling the patient workers. The architect at one point responds to the filmmakers’ questions about why more beautiful, lasting buildings are not constructed.
That’s it. There isn’t much narrative here. The sound, music, and images—all digitally captured and processed, including the high-contrast, startling monochrome visuals—are totally immersive.
I imagine that someone more familiar with both geology and architecture will find this film even more interesting than I did. Still, I recommend it to anyone looking for a beautiful, captivating, and thought provoking cinematic experience.
Review copyright © 2026 by Dennis D. McDonald
