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A little over halfway into Roc Morin’s essay documentary Meduza (2025) there’s footage of a murmuration of birds whose wavering shape seems to set the template for the film’s narrative meanderings, which are stylistically reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s eccentric documentaries but without Herzog’s quirky narration. The association is enhanced by Morin having produced Herzog’s Family Romance LLC (2019).
Meduza offers an intriguing cast of characters ranging from war-torn villages in the Ukraine to the Ecuadorian rainforest, with stops along the way in Hawaii, Japan, and India, rhyming and braiding themes throughout to create a composite construction evocatively and crisply shot by Morin and atmospherically scored by Filip Mitrović. Production marks are high. Meduza’s digital release on Prime has been tied to the 4-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine.
Recent projects such as Porcelain War (2024) and 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025) have addressed the tragic circumstances visited upon Ukraine through varying cinematic perspectives and techniques. Similar to Porcelain War, Meduza’s central character, Pavlo Aldoshyn (nicknamed “Pasha”) is an artist conscripted into military service, an actor who had been cast to portray a sniper in a film prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion who then channeled that skill set into becoming an actual sniper in an artillery brigade on the war’s front line.
Morin and his producer and longtime film collaborator Leïla Wolf met Pavlo when he was on brief leave from the front line. They were struck by what they perceived to be Pavlo’s unique spiritual perspective of himself in the context of the war. They set out to witness and chronicle his psychological transformation through a series of interviews conducted in Kyiv, Kharkhiv, and near the front line over the first two years of the war. Perhaps because he was already an actor, Pavlo is able to dramatically articulate his inner life, his dreams, and his spiritual mythology to provide the film’s core; but, with all due respect to his military service, this proves a problematic core in that—as they say—his acting technique shows. Several of his monologues feel rehearsed and staged, weakening the film’s authentic effort to express the intimate cost of war.
This doesn’t demean, however, the astute and fascinating amplifications explored by director Morin. It’s in those (again) Herzogian amplifications where Meduza is most effective though it does raise a chicken-and-egg inquiry as to whether Morin pursued external themes to underscore Pavlo’s inner life or whether inversely the external footage influenced Pavlo’s interviewed monologues? Either way, the effort to meld the two is an admirable and noteworthy construction.
Some of the film’s images—such as the wavering murmuration of birds previously mentioned—are hypnotic. The opening sequence of the forging of artillery shells connotes a choreographed industrial beauty that sadly leads to the devastating destruction of villages bombed beyond recognition. Morin has a gifted eye, however, and manages to sift abstracted beauty out of the debris of war while we listen to lovely accordion music played by Fedor, a villager from Zaporhizia, Ukraine.
Morin also has a literary gift for metaphor. “Meduza” is a word used in various Slavic (e.g., Russian, Croatian, Serbian), Baltic, and Romance languages that translates into “jellyfish” and, indeed, jellyfish serve as a recurring metaphor throughout the film. Voiced over the image of jellyfish washed upon a shore, Pavlo ruminates: “When you see a jellyfish on the shore you have a strange attitude towards it. You don’t know what it is. It is non-water. It is non-animal. It is non-entity. And your attitude towards that point on the shore is exactly that: non-existence.” Though that statement is problematically vague, Morin then centers the metaphor by segueing into a sequence where Artyom lierusalymskyi, Director of Museum of Jellyfish in Kyiv, Ukraine rhapsodizes on the marine animal in scientific detail.
Meduza next profiles Yoshinori Hasegawa, Kazusa DNA Research Institute in Chiba, Japan who seeks to unravel the phenomenon of immortality, using advanced machines to study the DNA of organisms. He expounds on how jellyfish regenerate in response to stimuli. Their cells grow younger and retract into an orb, which then becomes a new jellyfish.
From there we meet Dmytro Moldovanov, a painter in Parutyne, Ukraine, 10 km from the front line, whose witness of the war’s atrocities underscores his creative necessity to counter destruction with art. When the Russians blow up a nearby hydroelectric plant flooding the local zoo and drowning the animals in their cages, Moldovanov channels his sorrow into painting the departing souls of the animals as jellyfish with their tendrils like wings.
The tagline on Meduza’s theatrical poster quotes Pavlo: “A sniper takes the final portrait.” Whether killing a hare, or the enemy, Pavlo apologizes to the life he is taking even as he takes aim through the reticle’s cross on the scope of his rifle, which he compares to the lens of a camera. The crosshairs provide a focused intersection of two paths, two lives. Having been a photographer in his civilian life, Pavlo admits that his experience as a sniper has induced mixed feelings about the camera’s lens. The only difference between a photographer and a sniper, he explains, is that the sniper takes the final photograph. When a sniper gets his target in the crosshairs of his rifle, he is taking the last portrait of that person.
Morin then segues to Los Angeles art collector Maher Ahmad who combs flea markets and antique stores for photo albums from the past which he understands to be the photographs that finalize an otherwise unknown life. He remembers his partner of ten years succumbing to AIDS and how he felt compelled to take a photograph of his corpse in the body bag being carried out of the hospital: again, the final photograph.
Meduza endeavors to suggest hope and remedy in the face of Russia’s tragic onslaught on Ukraine, whether through a belief in reincarnation among the members of the Utekar family in India who are convinced that the soul of their patriarch has entered the body of his grandson coincidentally born on the same day. Or the alternate theory of reincarnation proposed by Nanki Callara, a native of the Achuar Territory, Ecuador, who believes that humans reincarnate as birds, trees, rain, fire. Or the ornithological perspective that recorded memory survives extinction, as with the account relayed by Patrick Hart of the LOHE Bioacoustic Lab in Hilo, Hawaii of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, which was declared extinct after the last remaining male was recorded singing a mating call to a female that never answered. Still, there remains a bird that imitates the call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō. The hope is that something we have lost will somehow come back to us, perhaps in a different form.
That shifting of form receives the bookend treatment in Meduza from the opening sequence of the forging of artillery missiles to a performance of “The Voice of Hell’s Arrow” by composer Roman Grygoriv of Kyiv, Ukraine who plays a repurposed MLRS BM-27 Uragan Missile with a bow backed by a chamber orchestra.
Perhaps that will be the score for the requisite question: after the war is over, will Pavlo be able to be the man, the artist, he was before the war?
