Director /co-writer Yeva Strielnikova’s Stay Online is set and was shot in Kiev, Ukraine, with the Russian invasion ongoing. Our story takes place on March 9th, 2022, the 14th day of defense. As refugee volunteer Ryan (Anton Skrypets) reluctantly sends requested photos of a deceased Russian soldier to his girlfriend Katya (Liza Zaitseva), we learn that Katya is out for blood. She finds the soldier’s mother online and sends her the photos while asking why her son is bombing and murdering innocent citizens.
Katya is in her apartment, trying to break into a laptop that belongs to a stranger. After finally decoding the password, she opens apps and adds her own accounts – Telegram, VK (Russian social media platform), and Facebook. This allows her to make contact with Ryan, her brother Vitya (Oleksandr Rudynskyi), and others. Ryan is helping refugees escape. Vitya has lied to his mother about being a volunteer when he’s actually armed and fighting. Katya installs a GPS app so that she can give the laptop to Vitya, allowing his team to track each other.
In the middle of this, Katya starts getting calls from Sava (Hordii Dziubynskyi), the six-year-old son of Andriy (Roman Liakh), who owns the laptop. She discovers that Andriy and his wife disappeared the day before, which means Sava may now be parentless. Between this and looking through Andriy’s calendar to discover how much he loves his child, she ends up redirecting her goal from chastising the parents of dead Russian soldiers to trying to find the parents of a little boy. Katya has now seen both sides of the coin and is perhaps regretting her earlier message to a dead soldier’s mother.
“…A Ukrainian woman looks for a child’s father during the Russian invasion ….”
It’s difficult to write a review on a film about a war that’s currently happening, especially if you have strong feelings about that war. People are dying – right now, as I type. I’d say it’s exponentially even more difficult to write and shoot a film about a war currently ongoing in your own country, in the same place that you’re filming. But that’s exactly how this happened.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Anton Skrypets was there, experiencing all of it – The bombs, the destruction of buildings and neighborhoods, the mass killings. He contacted his writing partner, Yeva Strielnikova, and shared an idea of how to convey their situation to the rest of the world. They were going to make a film about it. Not a documentary, but a drama set directly in the center of the war, in Kiev. Because of the danger of being in public, they decided that this was going to be a screenlife movie, in which most of the story takes place through screens. You still see action and horrific scenes, but through computer monitors and phones.
I’m not a huge fan of screenlife films, but I applaud this one as a tool used out of necessity, rather than being a hip or lazy way to make a movie. This film is well done, from writing to audio, cinematography, direction, and acting. In fact, the only nitpick to point out is the unnecessary use of melodramatic acoustic music behind sad scenes to convince you that they’re sad.
Stay Online is definitely not a feel-good film. It’s drenched in tragedy, but there are also needed victories accomplished. It will surely leave you feeling that something more needs to be done.
"…It will leave you feeling something more needs to be done for Ukraine"
