The Cost of Lies

Just over a year ago, I wrote these words as a preface to an incredibly overdue review: "The amount of writing I do is directly proportionate to the amount of inspiration I receive." The review in question was for the miniseries The Terror, starring Jared Harris and Adam Nagaitis, a frostbitten nightmare that restored my faith in the horror genre. 

It's been fourteen months since The Terror ran its course, and just as my newly restored hope was beginning to flag once more, along came Jared Harris and Adam Nagaitis to rescue me from stagnation yet again. And although the five part miniseries Chernobyl, chronicling (obviously) the meltdown of Russia's Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 is classified as a "historical drama", I call bullshit. This is pure horror, through and through.

I was sixteen years old when reports started popping up on our tiny TV set about an explosion in the faraway country of Russia, our bitter cold war enemy only recently softened by Sting the year before with his somber ballad "Russians." I remember a handful of images: ashen faced anchormen, stock footage of cooling towers, grainy images of smoking rubble. By the time it had happened, it was all over. That's what we thought, anyway. At sixteen, I was more concerned about boys and clothes and fitting in to worry about stuff happening on the other side of the world. The enormity of what had occurred never really hit me, not even as years went by and photos of mutated wildlife emerged, documentaries were released portraying the blasted aftermath of Pripyat and stories of the Elephant's Foot captured the imaginations of legend trippers everywhere. 

Nagaitis & Buckley as Vasily & Lyudmilla

Opening like any other haunted house or slasher film, we're introduced to a young married couple in the middle of the night. Lyudmilla, with her sunny halo of curly blonde hair, moves quietly through the small apartment while her husband, Vasily, sleeps. The concrete high rise they inhabit in the small village of Pripyat is no Candyman-esque Cabrini Green: it's green and tree-lined with parks for the children to play in. Lyudmilla, newly pregnant, has no reason to believe that their future will be anything but normal. But we've been looking out of the living room window for several seconds now, seeing what Lyudmilla hasn't yet noticed - a faraway glow hovering ominously over the distant sleeping god of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. When the distant explosion finally slams into the Pripyat apartment building, we've already realized what Lyudmilla is about to learn: Spring is over, nuclear winter is here. 

There's no monster present, no boogeyman visible to the naked eye stalking our protagonists. The arrogant pigheadedness of Chernobyl's plant directors - in particular, Anatoly Dyatlov's cruel, smug face as played by Paul Ritter will have you itching to slap him hard with a tire iron about 60 times in a row, or until your arm starts hurting - aren't even the primary antagonists here. They're just stubborn and stupid, the masks worn by the true killer lurking in the ruins. The monster is the toxic black smoke billowing from the blasted hole where once a core stood and functioned sanely, now swallowing helicopters whole and spitting them out to fall like discarded bones to the ground below. It waits in the glistening chunks of graphite littering the ground which, when touched, consumes the flesh of good men like flame eating up a sheet of paper. It is in the air and the rains of ash, seeding the clouds with cancer. It is in the water, insidiously threatening to slowly poison the very sea itself. It haunts the faces of Jared Harris's empathetic scientist Valery Legasov and stern Yes Man Boris Shcherbina, whose facade quickly crumbles in the face of Chernobyl's ruin. These two men, initially at odds but swiftly united by horror

and later joined by Emily Watson's amalgam of nuclear experts Ulana Khomyuk, become the Hammer vampire hunters, determined to rid the country of the scourge that has descended upon it, even at the cost of their own lives. 

This is when the version of Russia we've always been sold moves into view: stiff, formal and unforgiving officials in crisp suits, incapable of smiling, barking not only orders but demands, stubbornly insisting that no such thing could ever happen in Mother Russia, therefore it hasn't. KGB agents and soldiers with guns think they can deny the presence of radiation in their country by simply refusing to acknowledge its existence. Until, suddenly, they have to. The swift descent through the defcon levels is headdesk worthy: 1 - There is no problem. 2 - Okay, there may be a problem but it's contained. 3 - Okay, it may be a bit worse than we initially thought. 4 - Uh, we may have a problem here. 5 - Fuck, we're all going to die. 

By the time the severity of the situation is finally acknowledged, it's damn near too late. The first responders to the explosion - including Nagaitis's firefighter Vasily - have been isolated in a Moscow hospital where they are rapidly disintegrating into pools of open sores and jellied fluids. Sweet and sunny Lyudmilla can only stand by and watch as her husband literally melts to death in front of her. Either ignorant of or not concerned about her own exposure, she dons no protective gear and we're left to wait and wonder about the fate of her unborn child, which Vasily will never meet. 

But how do you fight what you cannot see? Monetary rewards and compensation are offered to the "volunteers" sent in to wade through the poisoned waters below the plant and shut off potentially explosive machinery. Miners are ordered to battle the encroaching beast in the boiling underground, which they do. Totally naked. And fully aware of the fact that they will all die, uncompensated and uncared for, but so absolutely badass that they cannot  - will not - refuse. Green young boys are quickly put to work on the animal killing squads in an episode that gave me a full blown, sobbing-like-a-bitch panic attack, as puppies and kittens and docile livestock are lured out into the open with friendly summons and quickly executed in an attempt to keep mutations from spreading. The deaths of the animals are not shown on screen (for those of you who cannot bear such horror, like me) and it's an understandable, necessary evil, one which quickly transforms the kid who carries it out into a hard, cold soldier, all innocence destroyed. The victims of Chernobyl were not just the ones who died in the immediate aftermath. Indeed, the mutations spread regardless of the best efforts to contain it - mutations of hope and happiness into sorrow and grief.

There's no happy ending here, and we're told as much in the pre-credit sequence. But if you needed a pre-credit sequence to tell you as much, you probably were as ignorant as I was of the massive scale of this incident, which isn't over and never will be. Not in our lifetimes, not in our grandchildren's either. There is simply no way to accurately describe the horror of Chernobyl, nor are there enough words in any written language to properly describe it. Chernobyl isn't a dry report, or a necessary chapter read as an assignment. It's visceral. You have to feel it and absorb it, let it sicken you and change your DNA. And the combined efforts of series creator Craig Mazin, director Johan Renck and the entire cast - Jared Harris, Adam Nagaitis (who is quickly ascending my short list of favorite actors, right beneath Sean Harris), Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson, Jessie Buckley, Paul Ritter, and so many others (including a few familiar faces from Game Of Thrones) - really slam the reality of the events into our faces like a searing handful of toxic graphite. And this is why I classify it as true horror: it burns, it hurts, it scars and disfigures. If you are still the same person you were after watching Chernobyl as you were before watching it, please question your humanity.