2026 • 195 min
DAU
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
Inspired by the lives of the Soviet physicists who contributed to the construction of the atomic bomb, DAU follows, over the course of four decades, from 1928 to 1968, the trajectory of Dau, a brilliant physicist of Greek origin who moved to the Soviet Union. Driven by the desire to understand the laws of the universe, Dau eventually places his talent at the service of the State and its scientific and military apparatus. Within a secret research institute, where science, power, surveillance and privilege coexist, his autonomy progressively contracts. Even the pursuit of happiness becomes a form of escape: Dau seeks freedom through a succession of extramarital affairs, yet the more he attempts to escape the order that surrounds him, the more he seems to lose himself and even his capacity to love.
Review
7 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 09. September 2026
What matters is that he knows he may be observed.
— Michel Foucault
— Michel Foucault
A film born from an experiment that ultimately tells the story of the compromises that shape a life and eventually alter the course of history.
The first misconception to avoid is to consider DAU simply a historical film about Soviet totalitarianism. Behind the film lies, in fact, a far more radical project, lasting more than twenty years, which progressively transformed an initial biographical project about the physicist Lev Landau into a vast cinematic, anthropological and artistic experiment.
The Institute in which the film is set was not merely a film set. In Kharkiv, an enormous complex was built, meticulously recreating a Soviet scientific institute; for more than two years, hundreds of hours of footage were shot there, within a universe governed by costumes, objects, hierarchies, language and behaviours consistent with the period. From this experience emerged an enormous quantity of cinematic material, subsequently transformed into different works.
But it is important to understand why Khrzhanovsky constructed all this. Not simply to recreate the past, but to place human beings inside a system and observe what happens to freedom when the environment, rules, power and the gaze of others begin to determine their behaviour.
This is where the project approaches the realm of a social experiment and, by analogy, that of Big Brother. Not in the television sense of the term, nor necessarily as a system of hidden cameras: the point is much subtler. It is the construction of a world in which the possibility of being observed becomes part of behaviour. This is the principle of Bentham’s Panopticon, later radicalised philosophically by Foucault: one does not need to be under constant surveillance; it is enough to know that one may be watched for control to become internalised.
But Dau is not merely a victim of the system
The true centre of the film, however, lies even deeper: what does it mean to be free?
Dau is a scientist who wants to understand the universe, yet he gradually finds himself absorbed into a system that claims the right to govern knowledge itself. His tragedy does not simply consist in being oppressed by Soviet power. It lies in the fact that he himself participates in the system that deprives him of his freedom.
And this is where DAU becomes surprisingly contemporary.
The question is not merely whether power can take freedom away from human beings, but whether human beings are truly capable of bearing it.
This is the territory of Erich Fromm and his Escape from Freedom: freedom, when it means responsibility, solitude, choice and the absence of certainty, can become a source of anxiety. The individual may then be tempted to surrender part of his autonomy in exchange for order, belonging, security and meaning.
In this sense, the totalitarianism of DAU is not merely a political regime: it is a psychological temptation. Power works because it finds within human beings something that allows it to work.
Khrzhanovsky’s decision to make Dau a man of Greek origin is not a biographical detail. It is one of the conceptual cornerstones of the work.
The director explicitly states that he chose a Greek because pre-Christian Greek civilisation possessed a moral and ethical system different from our own and, above all, because in Greek tragedy fate and freedom coexist: there is a higher order, but it is realised through a multitude of small human actions.
Dau thus becomes an almost tragic figure: a man who attempts to understand the laws of the universe while discovering that he cannot govern those of his own existence.
And it is precisely this contradiction that makes the character more interesting than a mere “genius persecuted by the regime.” The more Dau understands the world, the less he is able to understand himself.
Quantum physics, however, is the protagonist of DAU, even if this is less immediately evident.
Khrzhanovsky does not use it as intellectual decoration or as a superficial metaphor. He adopts it as a structural principle of the film. Documentary reality, dream, vision and historical memory are treated as different states of the same reality, while space and time cease to be entirely linear and stable.
This also gives rise to the work’s distinctive visual construction: different cinematographers, production designers and costume designers developed three autonomous visual worlds, altering composition, light, colour, sound, rhythm and the movement of the camera.
For this reason, DAU should not be viewed merely as a narrative that proceeds from A to B. It is rather a system of states: memory, matter, body, dream, history, violence, desire. As if the past were not something cinema must simply reconstruct, but something that can still happen.
Quantum physics thus also becomes a theory of cinema: reality is not necessarily a continuous line, but a multiplicity of possibilities capable of coexisting.
This is also how one can understand why DAU often seems to belong more to contemporary art than to traditional cinema.
The project encompasses cinema, anthropology, architecture, performance and installation; it is no coincidence that figures such as Marina Abramović, Carsten Höller and Romeo Castellucci appear in its history.
Khrzhanovsky does not simply want to tell a story about a world: he wants to construct it.
And this is perhaps his most radical operation. The set becomes an environment; the environment becomes a system; the system becomes behaviour; behaviour becomes cinematic material.
In this sense, DAU is almost a monumental, environmental artwork transformed into film. It does not merely observe its characters: it observes what a particular world produces in human beings.
Control does not consist solely in being observed, but in the possibility of being observed, that awareness which ultimately turns into self-control. This is the logic of Bentham’s Panopticon, taken up by Michel Foucault: surveillance does not need to be continuously exercised; it is enough for the individual to know that he may be seen for him to begin watching himself. Power, in the end, no longer needs to remain outside the individual: it becomes internalised.
From this perspective, the Institute in DAU assumes the value of a gigantic anthropological laboratory. The system establishes the rules and the individual progressively adapts to them. Control becomes habit, hierarchy becomes normality, privilege becomes a tool of complicity. Totalitarianism does not appear merely as violence imposed from above, but as a system to which human beings may contribute because it offers them order, protection and belonging.
The most effective form of control is not the one that physically prevents you from leaving. It is the one that convinces you that it is better not to leave.
Dau constantly seeks a way out: through science, sex, relationships, transgression. Yet every escape seems to reproduce the very structure from which he wishes to liberate himself. Freedom thus becomes a circular movement.
And this is where the film encounters Fromm: human beings may desire freedom while simultaneously fearing what it entails. They may seek autonomy and, at the same time, desire someone or something to decide in their place.
DAU does not simply argue that totalitarianism destroys freedom. It formulates a more disturbing question: how much of totalitarianism already exists within our need to be guided, controlled, recognised and protected?
In the end, what remains of DAU is not so much the reconstruction of the Soviet Union as the sensation of standing before an experiment on the human being.
Khrzhanovsky constructs a world with archaeological precision and then subjects it to the unpredictable laws of desire, fear, power and memory. His cinema attempts something paradoxical: to recreate the past in order to determine whether the past can still produce the same human beings.
And this is precisely both its strength and its unease.
In order to denounce a system founded on control, the director constructs, in turn, a device founded on rules, hierarchy and observation. The contradiction is not a marginal flaw in the work: it is probably its very heart.
DAU ultimately becomes an experiment upon an experiment, a machine studying a machine and, within both, a man desperately attempting to be free, even though he does not know what to do with freedom.
The perfection of power tends to render its actual exercise unnecessary.
— Michel Foucault
— Michel Foucault
This movie was in the official competition of 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026
